To bless and be blessed

Last year our family adopted a less fortunate family at Christmas. We loved it so much this year we adopted two family's from a list at church. Our church gets the names from a school in our town that is in a financially disadvantaged area. We take the kids and buy the gifts which are mostly clothes and shoes. Then we take the gifts with a food basket and deliver them to the family. We had two spanish speaking families this year but we made it without a translator and got the gifts to them. It is amazing to see where these people live and how overjoyed they are at something so small. It is hard to leave and not feel thankful or want to go back and give them more. I think our kids should see how blessed they are and that life is hard out there in the world.

My dear friend sent me a package this week and kept calling to see if I got it. It came yesterday and I thought I better open it in case there is food in there. So I opened the package and there was a can of chili from a famous chili restaurant in her area that she always talks about. I opened the card and a check fell out from her mom for $245- and all of the sudden check, after check, after check fell out all from people we don't know. She set out to establish a medical fund for Marty and all of our trips to Stanford we expect to make. She did this because she wanted to bless our family not because we needed it but to be a blessing and bear some of the burden. I was bawling for about ten minutes and we immediately set down and wrote thank you notes to the whole list. How amazing that total strangers would want to do something for people they don't even know all the way across the country. We are very fortunate to have good insurance that covers 100% of transplant and all we have to pay is housing for 3 months, co-pays for medication and travel. Really nothing compared to so many people who have to foot the bill themselves or with little insurance help. But this is a good start to our plans to build a seperate fund for transplant that we planned on funding ourselves. We would feel badly fundraising because Marty has such a good job and good insurance. We plan on just paying for it ourselves just as another bill in life but this is something really special that I thought was so amazing and share worthy!