Garage Sale Fellowship

It's been 2 weeks since our garage sale and people keep asking us how it went so this update is overdue. In short, it went great; better than I expected! We got rid of most of our stuff, even items that I thought no one would want. What we have left to get rid of feels manageable. With that being said, if you'd like to stop by and see what we've got left please feel free and take whatever you want!!

I went all-out with the signs, hoping to draw in a larger crowd, and I think it worked! I set up 17 signs saying “Selling Everything” within a 2 ½ mile radius and spray painted them bright pink. In heavier traffic areas, I put two signs next to each other, with one saying that we're becoming missionaries so that it would gain more attention and explain why we were selling everything. We got a bunch of comments from people about the signs and it even piqued the interest of a local newspaper reporter, who later interviewed us for a story.

The best part about the signs, though, is that we had many people asking us about our upcoming mission and sharing with us their experiences of going on foreign mission trips. A handful of people said they (or a family member) have done full-time foreign missions for a time, and some people even came JUST to talk about missions and couldn't have cared less about the garage sale itself. We had a lot of great conversations with people that we would have normally never met or spoken with about mission work. It made each day, exhausting as they were, so blessed.

Prior to the sale, we made fliers and went around the subdivision to let our neighbors know that we would be having a huge garage sale that weekend in order to sell all of our stuff to go on mission. We invited them to hold their own garage sale the same weekend to take advantage of the traffic coming in. Our two oldest boys helped us knock on doors and hand out the fliers, which they had fun doing. Most people were happy to talk to them (more so than me and Robert) and it made me chuckle thinking about how it may very well end up being the same way on mission!

At any rate, the night we handed out the fliers, we received an e-mail from a neighbor who talked to our 8-year-old and said he touched her heart. She asked how she could help and shared prayer intentions with us. I ended up meeting with her at the neighborhood park the next week, and it was joy to get to know her a little bit and share stories.

Another neighbor decided to hold her own garage sale on one of the days we had ours. She came over later that day to donate the money she made from it for our mission! We couldn't believe it! We weren't home when she stopped over so we all went over to her house to meet her and her husband and to thank them in-person. It was so nice to talk with them and hear about their experiences leading mission trips to Mexico with the youth from their church over the years. Before we left, we prayed with and for each other out on the front step.

In each of these encounters with people, it hit me how much I've been missing out by not going outside my comfort zone to talk to people I come across in day-to-day activities. I'm naturally quiet and pretty shy so it's difficult for me to strike up conversations with people I don't know. But I regret waiting until we're leaving to meet some of our neighbors, now having met two whom we'd have loved to have developed closer relationships with. Robert and I kept talking about this each night after the garage sale – that we met people we totally would have liked to get together with again if we weren't leaving.

On the bright side, though, we DID have the opportunity to meet these people whom we never would have had we not had this garage sale and advertised our upcoming mission. My hope is that we'll be able to stay in touch with some of them and get together with them on our visits home.

This past weekend, we had a table set up after the Masses at the parish we belong to to tell people more about what we're doing and to promote more vocations to foreign missions. One of the ladies we talked to hit the nail on the head when we she said we can take comfort in always staying connected to friends and family, even if we're far apart physically, through Christ as we intercede for each other in prayer.  Aside from that, our time apart is a blink of the eye compared to the eternity we'll be together in heaven. I wish I had written it down because she said it much more eloquently than that, but hopefully you get the idea anyways...

And with that, as we prepare to leave Minnesota in just a few days and say good-bye to family and friends, know that we are praying for many of you!  If you have specific intentions you'd like us to lift up, please let us know! We ask for your prayers for us in return as we move on to this next chapter in our preparation: a few weeks in Florida with Robert's parents and the birth of our 7^th baby before we start Intake in September!