Selfies with a chick fil a cow are a lot harder to get than you would think!
Our sweet friend, Robin, planned and put on a fundraising Bazaar for us. This was planned way before we had all the donations. In fact, we were only at about $20,000 when she started to plan it! Once we were given the anonymous donation which completed our fundraising, we decided to make it a PARTY and a Bazaar! In all, the Bazaar brought us to about $546 over our goal! There were some really fun aspects of this bazaar! First of all, the Chick fil a Cow came and was even more fun than we imagined he would be!
The organ was a huge hit with Livvy and everyone that heard it
Livvy and the cow had a lot of fun sneaking around the church together
Does anyone remember how Livvy really felt like God wanted her to talk to Phil Wickham about our project back when we started it? Well if you don't, here is her letter that she had written him and if you remember, we tried EVERYTHING we could think of to get it to him!
We started praying about how to get it to him around Christmas of last year. We didn't pray about that every day, but every little while we would ask the Lord how could we figure out how to get it to him? Well, our friend, Denise Witt, who owns Big Idea Media Group knows someone at WJIE radio station. Denise wrote them an email to ask if they knew how we could get it to Phil, and guess what? They were actually at that time, planning to have him come here for a concert! The concert was October 17, 2014 and they gave us FRONT ROW TICKETS!! Livvy has known about this since August and has been so excited! In fact, she could hardly go to sleep the night before the concert! We didn't know if she would get to meet him until the day of the concert and when she found out she was going to get to meet him, she could hardly contain herself! Here she is meeting him...
When Livvy saw Phil Wickham coming toward her she kept saying, "oh my goodness, OH MY GOODNESS"! She was so happy!
Us with Phil Wickham
It was actually a great feeling for her to be able to give him her letter and to say, "Our project is ALL DONE!!" He was super nice and he said this was an encouraging story to him. He seems to have had a hard year last year. We learned that he had to have surgery on his vocal cords so that took a lot of faith to believe God was going to heal him! He sounded GREAT during the concert! We think this was a blessing just for Livvy from God! Here are videos of Livvy's two favorite songs. It was pretty cool...he played both of them back to back at the end of the concert. Liv couldn't stop smiling! The first one is of him singing Beautiful. That is what she talked about in her letter. The Second one is her other favorite...The is Amazing Grace.
Livvy & I were the main speakers at the press conference. We thanked everyone that helped us!
October 16, 2014 was a super fun day! The Muhammad Ali Center invited us to have a press conference at the Ali Center to announce that we had hit our goal to raise the money we needed to build or upgrade the hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since it happened because of the generous donation from someone that heard us speak at the Humanitarian Awards at the Ali Center on September 27, 2014, they wanted to help us announce it - which was so super kind of them! We got to invite anyone we wanted to so of course, we invited the children that had helped us!
Chef Dodd from Sullivan came and spoke at the Press Conference
The Ali Center helped us to invite people like Chef Dodd from Sullivan and Denise Witt from Big Idea Media Group. The amazing thing is that four tv news channels came! I am going to include two of the channels here so you can see what they said about the conference. Here is the one that WHAS 11 put up. WDRB also put up the story on their webpage.
Livvy did a great job speaking! This is something neither of us loves but God sure has given us a lot of it to do for Him!
We made cake to eat to celebrate after the press conference
What we loved the most is that we got to invite the children that helped us. Some of them couldn't make it but Efrata, Katie, Blaise and his sisters Lyric and Kayia, Mia and Dr. Stucker's little girl were all there with us. My best friend, Isaac came and it felt like a party at the Ali Center! We made cake (of course) to eat afterwards. The Ali Center put it up on their webpage and we were so happy because not only are we done, we got to give God all the glory for this once again! It is really such a great feeling when you have done the thing that you knew God wanted you to do and you actually saw that HE IS THE ONE THAT DID IT! I can't really explain how happy this makes me and Livvy!
The quote says: "I always felt like I was born to do something for my people...some people have special resources inside, and when God blesses you to have more than others, you have a responsibility to use it right." Livvy & I agree!
If you still wish you had gotten a table to sell things or tell about your business we still have some great slots open! The Woodland Baptist Church youth group students are going to do a car wash and have things to sell also.
We sure hope you will stop by to see us and give hugs because we are still so excited about having gone past our goal! We are hoping that the sale of the concessions and raffle will help us get some medical equipment for the hospital now!
Psalm 34: 3 says, "O Magnify the Lord with me; Let us PRAISE His name together!"
This is our silent auction cake. A $500 donation was made to the Ali Center for it.
In our last post, we were dying to tell everyone the amazing thing that God did for us at the 2014 Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards but we wanted to wait until you could all see it on our donations page! A little while after Livvy and I gave our speech at the awards ceremony, Mr. Lessare, the CEO of the Ali Center came up to our dad and told us that there was a person in the audience that heard our speech who was so moved by our project and our words, they wanted to make a donation to our project. They told Mr. Lessare that whatever we did not raise from the auction of our cake, they would donate to get us to $35,000!! (We had already raised $22,173 up to that point). We were so excited we could hardly stand it! We didn't know whether to laugh, cry, scream, run around dancing...so we did what we have done every other time something great happens (or bad happens for that matter). We PRAYED! My mom, dad, Livvy and I prayed and thanked the LORD for doing this great thing for us! To some people, they might call this a coincidence. Someone once said, "All I know is that when I pray, coincidences happen a lot more often"! We KNOW this was no coincidence! GOD let that person be in the audience, hear about our project and have a kind and caring heart to help us finish it! We really wanted to meet this person but he wanted to remain anonymous so we have been praying for him to be richly blessed because of his generosity. Yesterday he made the donation and it was SO MUCH FUN to be able to go to youth group last night and tell everyone all about it! They had prayed for me and Livvy last week and they all wanted to hear how it went. When we told them that we are now OVER 100% they clapped!
Livvy and I made 50 cupcakes in about an hour to bring to the youth group to celebrate with!
We are now over $35,000...and we are going to keep going because we still have our craft bazaar coming up on October 18 from 9-2 at the Woodland Baptist Church. We are now going to have a PARTY! We will be giving away (can you guess?) FREE CUPCAKES! So come join us and celebrate this wonderful thing that God has done for us! We can't wait to see what will happen with this hospital, clinic or upgrades that can now go forward in the Democratic Republic of Congo!
This reminded us of doing camp cupcakes! The students loved them!
Muhammad says, "I will float like a butterfly and sting like a bee!"
Wow! Where do we start with this? Back in June the Muhammad Ali Center had called us and asked us to be part of the Congo14 celebration. If you remember, we spoke at their press conference when they announced that Bruno Mars was going to be the singer they were hosting. The Ali Center asked us if we would come be a part of their annual Humanitarian Awards to be held on 10/27/14. We said yes because we have never seen something like that and it sounded like fun to go to a banquet. They also asked us to make a cake for their silent auction. This would be raffled off and 1/2 of what they got for the cake would go to our project and the other half would go to the Ali Center. We said yes for that too. Well, this week was the week of the concert and then yesterday, was the second annual Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards. Livvy and I found out that Kid President (Robbie Novak) was going to be there, so we asked if we could make him a special cake. We also wanted to make a cake for Muhammad Ali so that when we met him, we would be able to give him a special treat.
We can't even describe how amazing it was to meet Muhammad Ali in person!
This is the cake we made to give to Muhammad Ali on September 27, 2014
They had a special table just for our cakes!
Kid President was so much fun! He liked the cake!
As the week got closer and closer we got more nervous. It started to seem like it was going to be hard. My mom decided to see if we could go to Sullivan Bakery to decorate the cakes so that if we needed some help, Chef Richardson was there to help us. We were so glad we did this! She was so helpful with smoothing the big cake and for helping us get the piping right and not turning it brown with the colors mixing too much! Here are pictures of the cakes and the event. It was like nothing we have ever ever ever done before! If you click HERE you can watch our speech. (if you watch all the way to the end you can see a really amazing video of the project the Humanitarian of the Year did). Matt Lauer from the Today show was the MC for the evening. It was fun to meet him. He is the person that interviewed Dr. Brantley who lived to tell about having ebola! Dr. Brantley is a missionary for Samaritan's Purse so that was fun to have as a common connection.
Livvy is putting on the first layer of frosting for our auction cake
Chef Richardson was giving advice about the number 1 cake for Muhammad WAVE3 was filming it
I had the edible image on the cake and was starting the piping around it
Finishing the piping. I love the rainbow! Chef Richardson approves!
Such a great feeling to be done! I came up with the image and Big Idea Media Group helped make it on the computer!
We had a auction table for the silent auction and set up our display
When we got up to speak they had a picture of us up on the big screens
Here we are practicing in the afternoon before the banquet
Our friend, Robin Ernst is helping to organize a craft fair to benefit our project. We will also ask each vendor/crafter to donate one item worth a retail value of $25 toward our raffles. If you have a business and would like to donate an item or service to be raffled, we will start listing your company on our blog/facebook page and what will be raffled off. THANKS FOR YOUR HELP! We are doing this together! When we started the project and realized we needed it to not be a "me" project, but instead to be a WE project, we never dreamed that so many of you would step up and do so many wonderful and creative things! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!
