Over the past few months, Handmade Hope raised over $360 for Ethiopian Orphan Relief!  Thank you to all my friends and family who purchased items for this worthy cause!

And I just heard yesterday that EOR has 100% met their goal of raising enough money to fund a school & orphanage in Southern Ethiopia!  (You can read about it here.)  Awesome!

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Handmade Hope should be opening again shortly with some really cool new items.  This time, all proceeds will be benefiting Gracehaven!  Gracehaven is an organization in Columbus, Ohio with the mission of finding and freeing underage girls enslaved by child sex trafficking.

Here are some sobering statistics on sex trafficking (via the Gracehaven website):

* Globally 1-2 million children worldwide are subjected each year to commercial sexual exploitation (Unicef)

* In the US, 100,000 are involved in commercial sexual exploitation (CSE).  350,000 US children are at risk of becoming entrapped in child sex trafficking.  The average age of entry into prostitution is 12-14 years old, and 10 to 15% of children living on the street have been sexually exploited.

* In Ohio, 1,100 minors in Ohio are estimated to be victims of child sex trafficking.  Toledo, Ohio is ranked 4^th in the nation for investigations, arrests and rescues of children forced into prostitution.

I’ll be sure to update you when Handmade Hope is open for business again!  I hope you will consider making a purchase to help Gracehaven.

My life is that of absolute extravagance compared to the rest of the world.  It is a blessing, but it is a burden too.  I believe in my heart that one day, I will be held accountable if I go through my life, as I always have up until this point, with a blind eye to the rest of the world and that attitude I am so often guilty of: it’s not my problem.

No.  It is my problem.

“When someone strips a man of his clothes, we call him a thief. And one who might clothe the naked and does not—should not he be given the same name? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat in your wardrobe belongs to the naked; the shoes you let rot belong to the barefoot; the money in your vaults belongs to the destitute.”
- – Basil (“the Great”) of Caesarea (329–379), Christian bishop and theologion.

I can’t even begin to comprehend the weight of the need in this world.  I can’t wrap my head around the number of people who are starving, needlessly dying, widowed, orphaned.   I just know it is so so big, and I feel so so small.

{ The Olympics }  Funnel & I have been glued to the TV.  I am generally not a big tv-watcher, but I think the olympics are one of the only times it is acceptable (and should be encouraged) to be a couch potato.  I’m not even going to watch LOST tonight. 

{ Europe }  We are less than three months away from our trip and judging from how my life has been lately, I think it’s going to come up really quickly.   So far, we’ve sent away for our passports (mine’s already been rejected once due to the crappy washed-out picture I got taken at Walgreens), we’ve booked a really great photographer to do a shoot of us in Paris, and found a travel agent to help us book hotels and our rail passes.   Someone asked in an earlier post where we are going… our tentative itinerary is: Paris, Nice / Monaco, Venice, somewhere in Tuscany (trying to work that one out with the travel agent) and Rome.  

{ Lifetime To-Do List }  When I was younger, I decided to make a lifetime to-do list.  When I started it, I decided it would have 100 things on it, and it did.    But the problem was that I was too concerned with coming up with 100 things, and not concerned enough with making goals that were meaningful to me.   In fact, I can’t even tell you anything that was on that list.  So I am starting over, and only adding things when something really strikes me.  So far, I have two things on my list.  The first is to go to the olympics.  Every olympics that I can remember, I’ve always thought, one day I want to go and see this live.  I remember knowing people who went to the Salt Lake City olympics and I was so jealous.   This is an expensive goal, but I think we can swing it someday.  Especially the next time the games are held in the states.  My second goal is to win a food challenge.  I know that sounds rediculous and not serious enough to be on a lifetime-to-do list, but I don’t care.  Funnel & I have started watching this show called “Man vs. Food” and the host, Adam, goes all over the country visiting the best restaurants in each city, and each show ends with some kind of food challenge.  The food challenge he does for the Columbus episode is at a little place called The Ohio Deli.  There’s a sandwich there called “The Dagwood” and it is the size of my head.  Funnel and I have split it a couple of times.  For my birthday, I think, I am going to attempt to eat the whole thing myself.  If I do, I get my picture on their wall of fame.  

{ Sad & Happy } I have felt so conflicted this week.  One of my best friends from college got engaged to a guy who is absolutely perfect for her.  Happy.  A good friend of the Frederick family passed away after a fight with breast cancer, leaving her husband and son.  Sad.  Our friends from church met their precious three-year-old son for the first time yesterday in Ethipoia and will be bringing him home soon.  Happy.  This family, that I’ve been following through my mother-in-law, are having so many roadblocks to their being re-united, on top of their child dying of cancer.  Sad.  And so much more that I can’t write about on here.  What a crazy world we live in, where one person can be having the best day of their life and at the exact same time, another’s world has been torn apart. 

{ This } “We’ll never be as young as we are tonight.”

Lisa is auctioning off a beautiful quilt on her blog to raise the money for her daughter’s ticket to Ethiopia.  Raffle tickets are only $5, or you can buy 5 for $20.  If you donate today (November 19th), Lisa will double the amount of entries for the amount you donate! 

Instead of spending $5 on Starbucks today, will you join with me in helping to send Honeybee to Ethiopia?

I was really saddened this past week after I read about the death of Steven Curtis Chapman’s daughter, Maria, the youngest of the three little girls they adopted from China.  I think I read that she was five years old.  She died in a freak accident in their driveway — her older brother was backing up and didn’t see her.

I hear about a lot of devastating things in the news everyday, but for some reason, this particular tragedy has stuck with me and has been on my mind the last few days.  I can’t stop thinking about them.  I am so sad for their sweet family and I can’t imagine what they are going through.

I haven’t talked about this a whole lot yet, but Lord-willing, Funnel and I would really love to adopt children, hopefully internationally.  A couple of weeks ago, we got the packet I sent away for from American World Adoption and last night I finally took the time to pop in the DVD it came with, and it was the Chapmans’ adoption story.  It was one of those weird, neat things because they had been on my heart lately, and then theirs was the story we’re presented with.  Very bittersweet.

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress…”
— James 1:27