I posted this on the forums as a final post to the thread I started showing my moustache / autograph card I was selling for the mission trip.  I know this doesn’t have much to do with baseball, but wanted to post it on my blog as well …

My wife and son leave for their trip on Thursday, so I thought I’d just give an update on the whole money raising part.  I had about 6 people buy the mini blue/red autographs of me, which was very nice of them.  I even had 2 people donate some money from the forums!

My wife decided to do a massive garage sale, and asked some friends/family members if they had any junk to donate for us to sell.

Yeah, they did.

We ended up getting a boat load of stuff.  People came through in a huge way.  While I was very thankful for the donated items, I was worried about the amount of stress it would cause just listing everything.

We stayed up in the garage last night until around 2am and were pretty much out on our feet by bed time.  Our neighborhood isn’t very well trafficked for this kind of thing, so our expectations were low.  To help traffic though, I went ahead and posted it on about 7 websites.

By our calculations, we had $637 left to raise for their part.  (We still are responsible for about $500 to contribute to the “pot” to pay for the building materials / furniture for the house.)  We had done a few other fund raising garage sales and the last one ended up bringing in about $150 or so which was great.

7am came early, and we feverishly started putting things out.  Before I even had time to litter the freeway and our neighborhood with our garage sale signs, people were checking out what we had.

By 8:30am, we were already sweat soaked because it was so hot and humid.  At the end of the day, we filled up the cardboard mobile (the name I affectionately call our minivan thanks to my several excursions picking up card collections) and packed it to the brim (not joking – I’m surprised I fit in the driver seat!), then dropped the leftovers off to “Resale with a Purpose”.

When I came back, we dumped all the money on the floor and counted it as a family.  Keep in mind the part to pay for my wife and son was $637 (I actually didn’t know this exact dollar until after the fact.)  We ended up selling $645.55!

Needless to say, we are very happy and will be going out for a victory burger later.  We still have about $500 left to go, but I would classify this as a miracle – that is a lot of money from a garage sale!  God is good all the time, but He was especially good to us today!