Thursday, July 29, 2010

"Smile! Your mother chose life!" :)

It is fair week here in my home county. Fair time is usually the signal that Summer is quickly coming to an end. One of the last big "hurrah's" before school goes back into session and such. See friends you have not seen in awhile by happening to run into them. It is time to forget about dieting to enjoy to incredibly unhealthy, but delicious fried fool... deep fried oreo's, deep fried pickles, deep fried snicker bars, fried pork tenderloin sandwiches, ice cream, corn on the cob, funnel cakes, elephant ears, kettle corn... the list goes on and on. I enjoy hanging out with the different animals, more specifically the billy goats and horses. Waiting at least twenty minutes or so to ride the best rides on bracelet nights. Going around for freebies at the many different booths. Fair time is easily a highlight for me every Summer.

This year I also helped out with our Knight's of Columbus Pro-life booth. At first since no one was sitting there with me I thought I would become bored fast. I realized though that by sitting there looking bored people walking by were less likely to check out the booth. I then began to ask people if they wanted free tootsie rolls instead of just waiting for people to come up and by them. I found most people donated a lot more that way. I sold at least ten of our bumper stickers and a few other little things we had at the table.

There was one man in particular I remember the most from my time working at the booth. He was easily sixty something years old. He came up to my booth with his grandnephew and after they both looked at the booth for about five or six minutes the proceeded to donate their money. We were selling these bumper stickers that say, "Smile! Your mother chose life!" The older man saw them and bought me out. Granted there were only three left, but still it was something. He then had his grandnephew help him put them on all over his shirt. He told me how he was disgusted by the idea of abortion. I learned he had seven siblings who all had huge families, but he was not able to. He helped raise his nieces and nephews. He talked about how sad he was that he was not able to have children. His grandnephew (I want to say he was about ten or eleven years old) was incredibly polite, and also donated money to help with the "Crisis Pregnancy Center."

I enjoy hearing a person's story. Everyone has one, and there is always something to take away from them. I know that if I had sat there all grumpy because there was no one with me, I would not have met this man and heard what he had to say.

1 comment:

Suzanne said...

Oh what a special experience for everyone in this true story and I want to thank you so much for helping too, Teresa. I was thankful and happy that each of my young people has a little something to do with manning this booth or helping out by not arguing about having to wait till we closed it up or whatever. I can say hear with a happy heart, that our entire family gave some form of participation even down to a grandchild helping a wee bit! :) I know God must have been smiling on us a little anyway. :) Amen........ (We all need encouragement and that is also the reason for this comment..not about bragging as it seemed to be an unusually difficult time getting people involved this year and I'm not sure why..kind of disappointing).