Benefit

In October our friends found out their four year old son, N, had Leukemia. This news hit like a ton of bricks and sent us spinning into a surreal protective mode. Protective of our own babies, holding them a little tighter but also protective of our friends, trying to find ways we could help their family through this trauma.

One of the ways we decided to help was through organizing a benefit for their family to help pay for expenses related to their years of treatment ahead. I had never been to a benefit but our planning team had some really fun ideas that we would hoped would raise a little cash.

We planned a carnival theme event with a chili/hot dog meal and a live and silent auction. We quickly realized that we might have bit off a little more than we could chew but after a lot of hard work and lots of planning it turned out to be a fabulous success.

To be honest, it probably required just as much if not more planning than my wedding! We planned for 500 people and I only had 200 people at our wedding. There was more than one night where I lay in bed thinking, "what are we going to do about this? and who's going to do this? and what about this?" So my lists grew longer and longer and I found it to be surprisingly energizing to check off those lists one by one.

A large part of the benefit required asking for donations of all sorts, time, resources, items, money. Normally this intimidates me but in this case I so strongly believed in the cause that I didn't feel a need to apologize as I asked for things. I was giving people an opportunity to be a part of something beautiful and it was so cool to see how generous people can be.

The event itself went off without a hitch (well, ok, I guess we had a few minor hitches). The community really came out to support our friends and the final count raised was above $17,000!! It was so inspiring to see so many people come out to be a part of something that allowed our friends to be able to take one major concern (finances) out of the equation over the course of the next several years.

N was not able to come to the event. It would have been too risky for his health to be at such an event but his parents were both able to come and I could sense the resigned, overwhelmed look on both their faces. It's not fair that children have to endure such atrocities and for one evening we were able to celebrate good instead of succumbing to the bad.