Simply Serve

A Few Miscellaneous Photos

2010-05-11T20:47:00.003-04:00

Here are a couple of miscellaneous photos that may give you some ideas of things you could do for upcoming mission trips. Summer time is the prime time for mission trips. School is out so the teenagers can go, teachers are out so you may have them participate in order to work with children, and most people would rather travel during the summer than during the winter months.
Here are a few photos of things you could do for the upcoming mission trips at your church or for one you are actually lucky enough to go on.

The Baby Doll is one that my mother refurbished. We would purchase dolls from thrift stores for about 25 to 50 cents each. My mom would then find baby clothes at thrift stores, make headbands, make doll blankets and clean them up so they looked better than new! She has made hundreds of them and we sent these dolls all over the world to little girls in orphanages. Attached to each one was a tag that said Jesus Loves You in their native language.

The baby with the pink blanket was an infant who lived in an orphanage in China. The children there were all disabled and were cared for by wonderful Christian ladies. We were able to send toys and handmade blankets to these little ones. I will post a copy of the VERY EASY pattern in the upcoming weeks.

The young boy is one who had no toys and had to make a car out of an old matchbox and 4 bottle tops. We were able to send hundreds of matchbox cars to his village in Guyana. He not only received these small cars but also the message that Jesus Loves Him!

The pile of stuffed animals were all donated by a local thrift store who was going to throw them away. My mom, grandfather and I all washed and mended the animals to look like new! These were all tagged with Jesus Loves You in the native language of the child it was going to.

Attached to this stuffed animal is the simple tag we attached. We put the symbols for the words Jesus Loves You in case the child or the adult was not able to read. We have these tags translated into several different languages and will also post these very soon for your free download and use.

We hope this got your creative juices flowing. Think about how you could minister to those in need on the summer mission trips making sure ALWAYS to send the items with the message that Jesus Loves them and that He saves.

Technorati Tags: Mission Trips,Mission Projects,Jesus Loves You,Orphanages,Toys

Spotlight on Simply Serve

2010-05-07T19:26:00.004-04:00

Gather Inspirit is a great site and this week they did a spotlight article on Simply Serve! The ladies at Gather Inspirit interviewed us using very insightful questions. They wrote a very nice article which focused on providing information to their readers about our new blogsite.

Hop on over to the Gather Inspirit site and read their Spotlight article to learn more about how and why Simply Serve was created. You’ll also learn a few interesting tidbits about me. You’ll find out what SassyCats is all about; who I’m married to; what my favorite food is and what frustrates me about blogging.

While you are there look around their site for articles on other bloggers and for articles on topics pertinent to Christian living. You’ll also find a link to the upcoming Relevance Conference.

Technorati Tags: Simply Serve,Gather Insprit,missions,blogs,service projects

Guest Post: Weekend Warriors

2010-04-29T20:37:00.001-04:00

Our lil' town of under 7,000 decided to put together a project to help out school children with food on the weekend. It has been identified by teachers in the Public School that there were kids who came to school on Mondays and didn't eat food or ate very little food on the weekends. These teachers also found such children 'hoarding' their lunch food... taking it home to have food to eat at a later time. This information got to the Pastors of our town and they, working with those at the school, put together, Project Weekend Warrior.

We have 8 Churches in our town who put together 150 or so food bags for the identified children for the weekend. The teachers quietly slip the children the food bags and off they go for the weekend. For the Christmas school break, we talked to the McDonalds, in our town, and they gave us coupons and gift cards at a discounted price so that we could put those in the food bags, also.

What is in the food bags?

Typical weekend would require 2 breakfast foods, 2 lunch foods and 3 dinner foods. Breakfast foods would be pop tarts, oatmeal packets, mini cereal boxes, etc.
Lunch and dinner would include individual serving packages of Mac ‘N Cheese, Ramen Noodle Soup, microwavable mini Ravioli, cans of spaghetti and meatballs, and more. We also include granola bars, fruit snacks, fruit cups, pudding, and other types of snacks. We also found out that some of the children did not have running water so we would include a bottle of water in each bag.

The Weekend Warrior Project relies completely on donations by individual members. When people would grocery shop each week, they would grab a few extra items from the list and bring them to the church. Church members would be assigned to forward the items to the Ministerial Alliance. Other local groups of people made monetary or food donations to the churches involved.

The Weekend Warrior Project found one problem. The food bags that were being sent home with the children were not as nutritious as what we wanted. Since we could not send fresh fruit and veggies home with the children we sent fruit cups and fruit snacks instead. We all worked very hard to try and send a variety of items home each week.

We have been told by a lot of teachers that this food has made a difference for these children. Once a month a leader from each church is sent to the monthly meetings of Project Weekend Warrior. This allows discussion time on what is and what isn't working. We plan on doing this again, next school year.

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Simple Serve wants to thank Susie QT Pies at Scraps of Life for writing this article. She is an inspiration to all of us: using her talents and gifts for others.

She loves Blogging and product reviews! She describes herself as a “Coffee drinkin’ Pastor's Wife”. She is a Homeschool mom of 3 girls. She loves to hunt recipes, watch movies, read books, and scrapbook.

So visit her site and thank her for her post!

Technorati Tags: Food Pantry,Weekend Warrior,Guest Post,Mission Projects,Food Bank

Guest Post Coming Next Week!

2010-04-18T23:20:00.002-04:00

We have a wonderful guest poster next week who will tell you about a great project that she is involved with and one that you may want to begin in your community.

Visit Susie QT Pies at Scraps of Life.

And the Winner is........

2010-04-17T12:44:00.002-04:00

Amy from Tiny Blessings said...

Hmmm... not sure I explained in my first comment the ways my family has served at the nursing home: my kids volunteer (ages 3 and 7),even as young as they are they can push wheelchairs, visit, and deliver treats and I'm following you now on Twitter @AmyMCGS

My niece picked a random number out of a hat, via Skype, and the winner is Amy from Tiny Blessings!!!
Yay to Amy!!!

Thank you all, especially you "@all-about-saving" (smile) for entering the giveaway. We are so excited about getting things started and this Blog party was a great way to begin.

Remember we give away Lessons and Instruction sheets (via your download) anytime you want. Just check our site.

Our goal is for you to walk the walk with you children and families - showing, modeling, and teaching them to do for others as God told us to in His Word.

Thanks all and Amy go start growing Tomatos and save some for those in need!!

Ultimate Blog Party 2010 Prize Giveaway!

2010-04-10T09:31:00.007-04:00

Whoops....I'm new to this and missed the deadline for the UBP10 Giveaway so we'll do our own Giveaway.

In honor of our brand new blog we are giving away a prize in the Ultimate Blog Party 2010. The prize goes right along with our Project for Seniors. This project is not only for Seniors but also for families or anyone interested in being God's hand extended to others.

The prize will consist of:

An Upside Down Tomato Gardening Kit

Plus Gardening Gloves and a few other great little gardening goodies.

This will get you set up for creating God's Little Garden. There is only 1 winner and only in the lower 48 states please.

How to win? Leave me a comment telling me what kind of project that you and your family have been involved with. You also get an extra entry if you sign up to follow our Twiter! (Leave an extra comment telling me you did)

The winner will be Randomly chosen on April 16th - so leave me an email address so that I can contact you.

Thanks so much for reading through our new blog site - keep coming back as we post more ways of honoring God by Simply Serving others.

The Ultimate Blog Party!

2010-04-09T21:11:00.000-04:00

We are joining the ultimate Blog Party for the first time and we don't know what we are doing! Our site has only been live for less than 1 week and we are already joining a Blog Party for Moms. So please forgive us if we did not do this right...

Since we are so new we don't have alot going on at our site but take a few minutes to look around and see what we do have going. If you read Our Story you will find that we are a Mom-Daughter team with the same heart.

We are a unique site. One that hopes to help you, as Moms, teach your children to have a servant's heart. Ministering to the needs of others as a way to become God's Hand extended is what we want to help you model for your children and family.

It's hard to be a Full time mom or a Working mom and still have time to do for others so we want to make it easy. As you peek in on our site you will see that we have downloadable Lessons and downloadable Projects. Not only projects of service that are easy but also frugal.

So Welcome to our site...we hope you will come back us and watch us grow!

Daisy

2010-04-09T13:13:00.002-04:00

Why is Simply Serve's logo a Daisy?

The daisy is a symbol of simplicity. It's message is one of innocence, purity and gentleness. A white daisy continues to represent affection, especially affection shown to others.

By the late fifteenth century the daisy symbolized the innocence of Jesus, the "Christ-Child". Since the daisy was the lesser exotic and pretentious of the flowers it seemed to be a fitting symbol for the baby Jesus. Since that time, daisies have been associated with children and the innocence of childhood.

So, a Daisy represents purity, innocence, affection, and gentleness. Doesn't this sound like what God described in Galatians 5:22-23, as the Fruit of the Spirit?

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control and against such things there is no law.

These are the ways of a servant and this is what we should strive to be.

Welcome!

2010-04-04T23:35:00.009-04:00

Welcome to Simply Serve. Ws are so excited to finally get this blog going as this is our heart. Missions and Serving others.

If you want to know more about the history behind this site visit Our Story.

The site is new and you will not find alot to look at right now but new ideas will be appearing every day.