I had one of my potentially biggest fundraisers this weekend, a yard sale! My sale was open over 4 days and I made a grand total of $1,500!!!!! How amazing is God?! This was my first yard sale (and probably my last), and as much as I learned about yard sales, I learned a heck of a lot more about myself.
I’m going to use this blog post to make a personal note of things that I need to remember. And maybe you guys can help me pray that God can creatively find a way to use me during the WR despite my weaknesses 😉
1. Lack of sleep makes me cranky
I can only imagine the amount of sleep I will be deprived of in 2017 as I travel from country to country. Anyone who has ever been within 50 feet of me while I am being woken up knows the catastrophe that is bound to happen when you “wake the bear” (me). I’m not a morning person. I require a decent 10 hours of sleep every night to wake up and not want to cry. This first item on my list is mainly an apology to the people who encountered “tired Katie” during the last 2 weeks (Mom, Dad, Ale, Stephanie, and Nicole).
2. It drives me nuts when I don’t finish everything on my to-do list
It also drives me nuts when my mom says “you can only do so much!” (Although, that is 100% true). I am still bothered that I never got to make my cute poster that showed how much I’ve fundraised and how much more I had to go.
3. I have never once successfully finished everything on my to-do list (refer to #2)
I drive myself nuts a lot I guess. Note to future self: please finally learn that your expectation to get everything done in the allotted time space is never going to happen. Maybe I make my lists to big?
4. I need to work on my negotiating skills!
I’m terrible at negotiating a price. I already knew this from previous trips to the Dominican Republic where I didn’t want to buy anything because I knew I would have to negotiate a price, but this fact was solidified this weekend.
Customer: “How much for this really expensive/nice thing that should probably cost $20?”
Me: “$1?”
I should have left the selling to the pros.
5. My upper arm strength is pathetic.
This speaks for itself. (Guess I’m hitting the gym tonight!) You know it’s bad when you have to take a break every 5 steps while carrying a chair…
6. This isn’t really about myself but this is an IMPORTANT yard sale lesson:
Before you stand up on a chair to hang something up, make sure the legs of the chair aren’t broken, because OUCH. I still have black and blue bruises all over my stomach and legs from that nasty fall (thankfully no one saw!)
7. If I have to ask for help, you can guarantee I am in desperate need of it
Because it’s just awful, I hate to make myself vulnerable and ask people for help. Isn’t that crazy!? So many people offered their help and I was so thankful because when it came down to it, I wasn’t comfortable asking anyone to help me with anything (except my mom, which is probably why she ended up doing the amount of work that 5 people should have taken on!). God made people for community. He’s been teaching me about the importance of community ever since I signed up for The World Race because let’s be real, fundraising $18,000 is going to require me asking everyone I know for help! I think this was the second most valuable lesson I learned from this yard sale.
8. Finding the end of your rope isn’t pretty
This was absolutely a lesson that I will carry with me throughout my journey next year. It was 3am the night before we were opening the sale and I had sent my mom and sister to bed because I was feeling guilty about them staying up so late to help me. I was putting clothes on hangers and running as many things outside underneath the tent as I could. The herniated discs in my lower back were flared up from all the heavy lifting throughout the day so I was in pain and was beyond tired. The exhaustion and pain in my body made me yell out to God “I don’t want to do this anymore!” It was the only thought racing through my mind. I was so discouraged by the amount of work I had left to do and that at the moment I was the only one doing it. I was discouraged that my back was in pain again because I had made so much progress in physical therapy. I started to doubt if people would even come to the sale and if all this hard work was even worth it. Soon I realized that it wasn’t just the yard sale I didn’t want to do, but The World Race. To fundraise $18,000, leave my family and friends for a year, to miss out on weddings and birthdays and holidays and my friends having kids… It hit me like a ton of bricks that I didn’t want to do all of this hard work fundraising to have to leave everything behind for a year. I was crying out to God underneath the yard sale tent asking him for permission to quit. That’s when new thoughts started popping up in my head. And in that moment God calmed my mind. He brought peace to my heart, he encouraged me, he told me he was proud. “Don’t you see, Katie? That this isn’t about you? Can’t you see that this is so much bigger than your life? This is about souls being saved, this is about people being healed, this is about bringing nations back to me. This is about restoring hope and restoring faith.” And it clicked for me. I always knew that this trip was God’s will for my life, but for the longest time it was what I had wanted, too. God told me that night that when I learn that this isn’t about me, I can stop relying on my own strength to get me there. It doesn’t matter if this seems like too much work for me to handle, this is his plan and it’s not my job to do anything except trust in him and go where he leads me. I can fall back and let him fight the battles of discouragement and exhaustion. I can trust that if I put my all into what he has called me to do, he will do the rest. I don’t have enough skills or time to raise every penny of this trip all alone, but God sees where every last penny will come from. I don’t have the strength to leave behind my life for a year, but I know that this is about so much more than what I think I want. I know that next year I will find the end of my rope over and over again, but I also know that when I do, God will be there ready for me to latch onto him and let him get me through it.
At the end of the day, this yard sale surpassed my goals. I hope to make at least $1,000 but I knew that was a high goal. God came through. I did my part, and he did his. Just like he promised. T H A N K Y O U to every single person who helped out so much this weekend. You all were a gift from God to me this weekend <3 On that note, I have to go make a big deposit! :)))))
