Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

missions

How you can help others by selling your stuff

Garage sale season is gearing up. And if your neighborhoods are like the ones where I live, then it’s only a matter of weeks before garage sale season reaches its peak. Once school is out, it seems everybody and their neighbor takes the opportunity to declutter and make a little cash.

If you’re considering having a garage sale this year, let me offer you an opportunity through Help One Now to declutter AND help fund projects in Haiti and Uganda.

The details and resources are here, and you can read stories of how other people have hosted their sales.

Like this 7-year-old boy who wanted orphans in Haiti to have Christmas. So his family helped him organize a sale in November that raises $1,400.

Or this woman who decided she might not be able to do much but compared to what she was doing, she could do a whole lot more.


Here’s what’s true: We, Americans, have way too much stuff.

Just look at these statistics from the Self-Storage Association:

  • There are now approximately 49,940 “primary” self storage facilities in the United States as of year end 2011.
  • One in 10 US households (HH), or 10% (10.8 million of the 113.3 million US HH in 2011) currently rent a self storage unit; that has increased from 1 in 17 US HHs (6%) in 1995 – or an increase of approximately 65 percent in the last 15 years.
  • There is 7.3 sq.ft. of self storage space for every man, woman and child in the nation; thus, it is physically possible that every American could stand – all at the same time – under the total canopy of self storage roofing.
  • The self storage industry has been one of the fastest-growing sectors of the United States commercial real estate industry over the period of the last 35 years.

We have “houses” for our stuff, and worldwide, there are people who don’t have houses for themselves.

We can do better, can’t we?

So, if you’re planning a garage sale this summer, make it a win-win for you and global poverty by donating your garage sale earnings to one of Help One Now’s projects.

This site makes it easy to plan. So, grab some stuff, grab some friends and make a difference!

 

We're on Food Stamps and We're Not Like That

Everyone’s looking at me.

The thought weighed heavy on my mind as my face flushed red with embarrassment. I slid the card through the electronic reader, entered my PIN and anxiously waited for the transaction to finish.

I’d bought groceries plenty of times before, but this was the first time I’d used government money to pay for them.

A year and a half into our marriage, we moved 800 miles across country so my husband could start graduate school. We had a 5-month-old daughter, and for the first time in my adult life I would not have a paying job.

It was an act of faith, to say the least, to go where we felt God leading. We just didn’t expect it to be as hard as it was.

Read the rest of my guest post for Live58 here.