Wanna Help?

Today on this blog, I’m fulfilling my lifelong dream of being a telethon host.  Well, “lifelong,” as in, “I thought about it roughly 20 seconds ago and realized that this should definitely be on my bucket list.”

This will not be a complicated telethon…no fancy big checks a la the Michael Scott Dunder Mifflin Fun Run Rabies Race For the Cure 2008, no guest appearances by Wayne Newton like Jerry Lewis has, nope…this is just one short list of needs, followed by your response.  Simple enough, huh?

In just a few weeks I’m leading a Summit team overseas, where we’ll be working with 600 church planters for a week, just encouraging them, loving their kids, and praying for them as they prepare for their next season of ministry.  The 600 of them plus 125 stateside volunteers will be basically taking over a hotel during that time. 

The director of volunteers for this trip has put out a call for some specific gifts for the workers at the hotel, with whom a deep relationship has been built over the last few years.  We want to be a blessing to these hotel workers and open up a door for the gospel with them…and that’s where the First Ever Connective Tissue Benefit For Overseas Hotel Workers Comment And Pledge That Which Costs You Nothing Telethon (F.E.C.T.B.F.O.H.W.C.A.P.T.W.C.Y.N.T.) comes in.

Here’s what we’re gathering; notice that the first two items are for a couple of specific hotel workers who collect this sort of stuff from all over the globe:

• Restaurant menus.  The kind that they actually give you to take out of the store, not the kind that you have to slip into your wife’s purse while the waiter is distracted by your kid asking for his sixth refill of chocolate milk.
• Gift cards.  These do not have to have any value on them, because what are the chances of finding a Sonic overseas?  (mmmm….Sonic.)  They can just be the cast-offs that have been filling the bottom of your purse.  Please pick off the lint before handing them in.
• Little Debbie brand snacks.  Oatmeal Cream Pies spell love in any language, straight from the heart.  Pulls us all together, never apart…
• Peanuts.  Especially flavored kinds, like honey BBQ, cajun, etc.
• Anything North Carolina-ey.  Keychains, stickers, the stolen head of the Duke Blue Devil, you get the picture.

Got some of this stuff?  Here’s how you get me the goods:

• Put it in an envelope with my name on it and turn it in at the Information Table / Tent at your campus this Sunday.
• Drop it by the church office.
• Fill out a pledge card, wait on a receipt for tax purposes, dilly dally until I send you a reminder of your pledge, and then begrudgingly drag your stuff to RDU the morning we leave so I have to find a place to stuff it in my luggage.

Seriously, thanks.  This is gonna be a cool first telethon.  On behalf of F.E.C.T.B.F.O.H.W.C.A.P.T.W.C.Y.N.T., thanks for your support.