Soles4Souls.org

Occasionally you will encounter something that needs to be shouted about, last night I witnessed one of those things.

We have some very good friends, Scott and Christiana Finch, who have a couple of girls, Lily and London, who are very important to my boys. Seriously, they love each other. They've spent most of their lives together and a lot of the time they are kind of like brothers and sister. Lily is about to turn 5 years old and had her birthday party last night. Instead of gifts Lily encouraged everyone to bring a pair of new or gently used shoes. Yeah, you heard me, INSTEAD OF GIFTS! The shoes that were given will be sent to a great organization called Soles4Souls. You can find out more about them here. To date, they have given out more than 10 million pairs of shoes.

I'm thankful for friends like this because parenting is so hard. It's very difficult to teach your children how to put other people first...it's very difficult to teach adults to put other people first. I'm thankful that we were given an opportunity to teach last night. As we enjoyed all the "normal" birthday party stuff (splash park, swings and gluten free cupcakes) Jacob asked me, "Daddy, when is Lily going to open up her presents?" I had another opportunity to talk to him about how important it is to put other people first.

We have been given so much and it's always refreshing to see people trying to teach their children that we are not to terminate the grace and mercy of Christ on ourselves.

Jacob gave a pair of Spider-Man sandals and Eli gave a pair of Buster Brown velcroes. All told I think Lily collected 49 pair of shoes. Thats 49 children in various parts of the world that will very soon have, possibly, their first pair of shoes.

Lily's doing her part...what will you do to change the world?

ZS