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The Sale Must Go On

October 06, 2006

Thursday I spend half my day loading up a truck full of clothes and other various items to take to my mother's yard sale. Kendall had lots of clothes to get rid of and I had a few clothes and some other items that I wanted to try and sell. Most of the time we just take our clothes up to the mission, but since we were having the yard sale we decided to just slap $.50 on get rid of them that way. Early this morning I drove up to my moms and the selling began. It was really busy for the first two hours and tons of clothes and furniture went. The first thing to sell was an old porcelain dragon that I painted in high school. Everyone laughed at me when I said I was going to sell it, but LOOK WHO'S LAUGHING NOW, HA HA HA! Ok, so it was only $.10. It still counts. It was a sale. And now some lucky soul has some beautiful artwork in their house that was painted by yours truly.

At lunch time I drove back up to the yard sale location to see how things were going. I also wanted to eat with my wife who is helping at the sale. Mom made some delicious taco soup that I wanted to devour, but I had to exercise self control. Normally I would chow down on two to three full bowls of taco soup with crunched up Doritos and lots of shredded cheese. Yummy. However, today I pulled a little half bowl out of the cabinet and dipped myself on ladle full of soup. I ate that with a half can of tuna and crackers. Afterwards I was so full I couldn't hardly move. Hard to believe huh? Normally I could chow down on three full bowls and finally I just eat a half a bowl and some tuna and I'm stuffed. This is a wonderful sign. It means my stomach is shrinking and I just can't eat as much as I used to. I hopped on the scale today to find another pound gone. I've gone from a whopping 267 to 239 so far. I can't say that it is all from doing weight watchers. I had actually lost 10 pounds before I even started this new plan. Over the last 4 weeks I've lost another 18 pounds. Thank you Lord for the motivation and the self-control that you've given me.

Ok.. now back to my original story. What was I saying???? Oh, the yard sale. While I was sitting there this afternoon a lady came in that was really looking at a lot of the stuff at the sale. She started picking up all kinds of things and acted like she was in desperate need of a lot of this stuff. I began to feel some compassion for her, just seeing the way she was looking around. When we added all the stuff up she was short. She went to her car and tried to find some more money, but finally came back to try to pay us with a lotto ticket. There was no way I was going to tell this lady that she couldn't have that stuff is she didn't have enough money, so I told her just to take it... It made me realize how helpful yard sales can be. It's kind of like having your own mission in your back yard. There are some people who genuinely need help and instead of letting all of this stuff sit around and collect dust and just go to waste, we have the opportunity to give it to people in need. Whether you sell it for $.10 or give it away, you are still providing a valuable resource to some people who couldn't have that kind of stuff any other way. If people don't have the money we don't hesitate to give the stuff to them anyway.

Another lady came in and started to buy large amounts of Kendall's clothes. She had three or four Wal-Mart bags stuffed full of clothes. As it turns out she takes all of these clothes and gives them to her daughter in college. If her daughter can't wear them, then she takes them and passes the clothes out to people around her that need them. For the price of a t-shirt at Wal-Mart she was able to send her daughter tons of clothes.

Of course, it also made me feel a bit guilty about all the stuff I hoard in boxes and tubs at my house. Stuff I don't need. Stuff that is just going to sit around and collect dust.

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