Star of Hope

We had a VERY special night last Sunday...the girls in my bible study and all our families took a trip to the Star of Hope to serve cookies and milk to the folks staying at the shelter. 

We have been planning this for about a month and all of us were very excited.  The kids collected blankets and toiletries in their classes to take with us.  Matt's teacher, Mrs. Hathorn got all of first grade involved so we had lots of goodies!  When I went to pick up the donations from the school, every kid in Matt's class came out to my car with something in hand.  It was precious!  So M&M helped sort through everything to get it into boxes.

Then Matt and Dad loaded everything in the car.  We had so much that we had to ask Mrs. Aseena to come over and load all the blankets in her car.  Our trunks were packed!

We all met to say our prayer and set our plan for the evening.  We had 20 kids total and they were ready to go!

The older kids did a great job serving cookies and the younger kids did great handing out milk, crayons, coloring sheets and bible verses.  I didn't get the best pictures because I could not take pictures of the SOH guests.  But I got a few good ones... 

Thank you to all of the families that joined us and for Star of Hope for making this volunteer opportunity available for small children to participate. 

I wasn't sure if my kids would "get it" but they definitely did.  Matt was very touched, sad and concerned about all of the people that were sitting outside of SOH. He asked me what they were doing waiting on the front steps. I explained that the rooms at SOH were full, so those people were waiting until they cleaned up from our event because they were going to sleep on the floor in that large room. I explained that the blankets that we collected were going to be very helpful to those people. I could tell this really bothered him and a minute later he asked how come SOH doesn't build a bigger shelter so everyone could sleep in a room. I explained that they are working on that but it's
going to be expensive and they are raising money. He asked if we were going to give money to help build the new shelter and I said yes! At bedtime his first prayer was "please bless all the people that have to sleep on the floor at SOH and please help SOH get money to build a bigger shelter". 

Please keep Star of Hope in your prayers too.  It is am amazing organization that doesn't receive a lot of funding from the government because it is faith-based.  So many people that were staying at SOH thanked us for coming and that's what made it all special.