life after love week

It's been over a month since I've blogged-I'm such a slacker! There has been a lot going on lately, I'll try to give a quick overview. Love Week happened and it was a huge success!! I'm not sure if I have mentioned Love Week before but basically it was a week long volunteer event at Elevation. The idea was to have at least 5,000 people from Elevation volunteer 5,000 hours at various organizations around the city in one week-yes, it was as crazy as it sounds! I was one of the people that were running it/ in charge of everything....I pretty much got no sleep that week but it was worth it. All the several months of hard work and planning paid off. We exceeded our goal and had a total of 10,5581 volunteer hours served in Charlotte that week! We made over 12,000 sandwiches for the homeless, rebuilt playgrounds, cleaned up parks, painted, sorted clothes, scrubbed walls, picked up trash, served food, did extreme makeovers to offices, worked in schools and much more all in that week. Plus we were on the news and radio multiple times!

I wasn't sure what I thought of Love Week when I was first asked to help out. I'm not a fan of making sure everyone knows how many good things you are doing for others and I don't like when people think that volunteering for one hour every few months is all they need to do. My goals and ideas on success for Love Week were a bit different than most everyone's else's. I not only wanted to have my events run smoothly with a ton of people but also to open their eyes to the needs of the city. I wanted to make sure people understood who they were serving and how real homelessness and poverty is. I wanted people not to feel sorry for them but to see the face of God in them and allow God's pure and amazing love to shine through them. People began to ask questions about homelessness, injustices, poverty and how to love others who are different than us-it was so great! I absolutely love talking about those things! It's my hope that the people from Elevation will continue to volunteer and serve in Charlotte.

Even though Love Week was crazy, there were several fun things that helped me to stay sane and stress free: v-day package from my momma, swinging with Sam, coffee dates, playing in the snow, lunch with Queen, v-day package from my wonderful ATL friends, bowling, painting rocks, dance parties at Crisis, Lost, and of course many trips to Target. I've been helping plan Love Week since I moved here so life is weird without it. I was sick most of last week which I believe is a result of lack of sleep...no fun. My mom came to visit for a few days-it was sooooo great! That's all for now kids, I need to go to sleep! I promise it won't be a month before I write again....good night!