Bettie's Closet....How Our Parent's Home Taught us to Give: Rays of Hope and Help

August 18th, 2016
After the dumpster was filled and taken off, John had packed 18 large boxes and 70 bags of clothes that went to Goodwill. Liz from Open Table, who sets up places for the Homeless in Nashville came. She took 30 comforters, 100+ towels, 5 sets of silverware, 15 lamps, 30 sets of dishes in packs of 4, glasses and cups. The Next Door came and took 10 bags of women's clothes. Dee from Grace Place came to get 5 large bags of jewelry and 5 bags of purses for single women in prison with children. We still did not know how we were going to make this work with the non profits taking this small amount. Again...prayer and taking one day at a time. Little did we know what was right around the corner!

Only a small amount of her costume jewelry

Loading up furniture for a Garage Sale

Cheron and Melanie are a Mother and Daughter that found our about our need and our desire to donate to the community from their church, Long Hollow Baptist Church. They run a wonderful ministry called Be Blessed in Hendersonville that gives to the needy community in this area. When they walked in the door they saw the amount of clothes, dishes, shoes and, yes, they were amazed! Although they quickly had fantastic ideas about how to turn all of this into a blessing for their organization and other non profits. Janet and I were excited and amazed as we listened to their plans and we no longer felt alone in this process!

After a few days of assessment and planning, they brought in their friend and the person who help to start Be Blessed. Micki came in with the same exuberance and told Janet and I that she was our "logistics person". She had also started jonahsjourney.org several years ago, a ministry to serve the children of incarcerated mothers. She knew all the non profits and who to call for what. Each day we would start with a meeting, in which she would tell us the plan for the next few days or weeks, As we went along, the plan sometimes changed. More needy countries were added, more garage sales were added that needed to raise money for missions trips, more families needed a kitchen set up, more non profits got involved. We were just beginning to see how each day, our parents extra stuff was helping hundreds of people.

While Cheron, Melanie and Micki were organizing everything into areas, Janet and I gathered anything sentimental, old or vintage and put into areas for our family to look at or in an area for an estate appraiser to look at. Micki has a friend, Joseph, that will look at all of this in October