Add this to a long list of things God has gotten me into that I never imagined I would ever be doing: door to door support raising. I didn’t even realize that’s what I’d be doing when we set out to implement our newest, and to date, craziest, support raising strategy, but sometimes God has His own plans (technically He does all the time, sometimes I just forget it).
The idea was to save money on postage. At least that’s what I thought the idea was. Tomo and I were recently preparing our June newsletter, which includes a DVD, when we realized that it would cost about a $1.50 in postage to send each one. About 60 people on our mailing list live in the South Orange County area, so we figured we could save some money delivering those ourselves, and hey, it might be a good chance to say hi to some people we haven’t seen in awhile. After plotting the day’s deliveries in Google Maps, we set off. By the end of the first day I was blown away by how much better God was at organizing things than I was.
People are busy, and I’ve often been a little discouraged at how difficult it is to get an appointment to go talk to someone about our Japan. I usually play phone tag with people for a few weeks, exchange emails, texts, then they go on vacation, and when they get back, sometimes they can squeeze in a time to get together with us. And that’s just how life is here in California, we’re all busy people. So, I figured we’d show up, hand over the envelope, exchange small talk and be off. But instead we almost always found ourselves invited in, and asked about how things were going, and what we were up to. Turns out driving to someone’s house and knocking on their door is often the best way to talk to them.
Last week we spent four afternoons doing this. It was probably the most fun I’ve had support raising since I started. We got to know some of our supporters better, reconnected with friends I hadn’t seen in years and even meet new people for the first time. Sometimes we just caught up on what we’d been up to, sometimes we just dropped off the envelope, often people wanted to pray with us, and a few times we gave a full on support presentation and left with people promising to pray about financial partnership. Having something to hand over turned out to be the perfect excuse to drop by for a visit. No one minded, in fact almost everyone said they appreciated that we took the time to stop by in person to talk to them. But if they were busy we just gave them the newsletter and DVD, and went on to the house on our list.
We’re still waiting to see what God will do as far as raising up actual financial support, but regardless of that we had an encouraging and enjoyable time. We’ve still got about thirty or so deliveries to make, and I’m excited to see more old friends and meet new ones. So if we show up on your door step in the next few weeks, don’t be too surprised.
Side note: How many friends do you have that live within ten minutes of you that you haven’t seen or talked to in the last five years? Try stopping by their house some time and saying hi. It’s kind of fun.