Recently, we’ve been encountering a lot of these, manifesting itself in the form of our unexpected expenses. I think a lot of us, in one way or the other, have been on the same boat at some point in our lives.
I won’t go into all the details here since it is a very long story and deserves another post in itself, but just to give you a brief overview, our house was recently flooded (January 16, 2017), a day before my wife underwent a CS for the birth of our little girl. Add those up and you will start to see your expenses pile up.
We needed to cut back on our expenditures and had to re-evaluate our basic needs from our wants. We decided to hold off on buying a lot of things for our little girl like strollers, car seat, clothes, toys and other baby stuff (once you become a parent, especially if you are a first-time parent, there is this tingling need to buy a lot of baby stuff for your child). We also had to find out where we were going to get a new fridge to store Raissa’s expressed milk since we couldn’t afford to get a new one just yet. Getting the house in order was placed on top priority, every other need apart from Raissa’s meds and the baby’s needs were pushed back.
Thankfully, a lot of our prayers were answered. We were blessed with family and friends who are very generous and have been helping us out without expecting anything in return. The things we were praying for started to arrive one by one. From the people our landlord brought in to help clean the mud, the pressure washer loaned to us to help deep clean a lot of stuff, the clothes our baby is now wearing and even 3 new refrigerators (2 bar fridge and a big fridge with bottom freezer). The list just goes on up until today. I’m sure a lot of you will wonder what’s on that list. That will be listed out in detail on my next post.
Most of the things that were shared to us were mostly baby stuff which our little girl outgrew fairly quickly. Things like the Moses basket, bath tub, and baby clothes. Some are extras like the car seat. Most of these stuff are fairly new and a part of me, the selfish part, wanted to keep them just in case there’s a follow-up baby around the bend. And then I remembered the joy we felt when we received all these stuff, how our hearts were touched by the generosity of the people around us. We want to pay this feeling forward to other people, mostly to new parents who are facing the same struggles that we faced early on. And we don’t want it to stop there as well because we also want them to pay it forward.
With this in mind, Raissa and I came up with “Bless Me Forward”. This idea of “paying it forward” is not new, in fact, there was even a movie that came out a few years back on paying a good deed forward. Our idea is to make the sharing continuous by documenting it and making it visible, listing down the previous owners to see how many families have been blessed through this very simple act of sharing.
We made a sticker label which you can download and print and stick on to the items that you are giving away. Write your name on it and the name of the recipient and when it is their turn to give the item away, they write down the name of the new recipient as well. This way, the person on the receiving end can thank even the original owner of the item if it was handed down through 2, 3 or 4 levels already. As long as the item is still in good working condition, the new owner can always pass it down to the next.
If you have some stuff that you are no longer using and you feel that other people can benefit from your item, we invite you to take up the challenge and share it on. See how far your item will go and how many families can benefit from it.
You can download the ready-to-print templates below. If you need a different sized label, leave a comment in the comments section below and we’ll see to it that we will make the appropriate format that you can use.
