Be The Blessing Goes To Vietnam
August 03, 2008 Filed in: Blog
About 18 months ago I was watching the CBS Morning Show on a Saturday morning, and they were doing a story on The Free Wheelchair Mission. These guys developed a wheelchair that they can build and deliver anywhere in the world for $50, and that is a good thing because there are over 100 million people in the world who need one and can't afford one. The FWM has given away over 300,000 wheelchairs to date.
They were going to be riding bikes across the country to raise money, and it just so happened that they were going to be coming near my hometown of Wheeling, WV. So I emailed them. My thought was... here are some folks who are being the blessing in a huge way and I want to meet them and cheer them on. A week later they rolled into town, and they ended up speaking at my church that Saturday night.
Some things are just meant to be, and I was meant to give away wheelchairs. That email changed everything for me. The events that unfolded because of it showed me a whole new way to Be the Blessing. That was April '07 and by November I was in Vietnam with Don (the guy who invented the wheelchair) giving away 550 wheelchairs to people, many of whom crawled there to receive a chair. One of the greatest privileges and most humbling things you can do is pick someone up who has been stuck on the ground and in the dirt for years, and place them in their own brand new wheelchair. It changes their life and your life instantly.
While in Vietnam I made plans to come back in September '08 and bring a group of people along to distribute another 550 chairs. So for the first two weeks of September, 16 of us, mostly from the Wheeling area, headed to Vietnam for a two week adventure of Being the Blessing. I did a Blog for both trips, and they are still up if you would like to go back and look at the articles and look at the pictures. It is quite a ride. November '07 Trip .September '08 Trip
When we dreamed up Be the Blessing as our mission statement, we were thinking on two levels. One, don't miss the small stuff. It happens every day, and there are always opportunities to Be the Blessing. That makes life an adventure and those small things add up quickly to change the world. The other level was to dream big. What kind of big stuff can we do to help people and change the world. This story has both. A simple email of encouragement (small stuff) leads to changing the worlds of over 1000 people in Vietnam (big stuff). Pretty cool.
Be The Blessing,
Chris