It’s Valentine’s Day, and the last of the blessed gifts have been delivered.
“The Blessing Of The Gifts” is an annual holiday project of the Lake House Health & Learning Center in cooperation with the members of Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church.
Each year for six years we have collected toiletries, stationery and other small gifts for the Christmas holidays for the incarcerated teen girls at the Southern Oaks Girls School as well as other places where poor and needy people typically seek services, such as the Women’s Resource Center, Bethany Apartments, SAFE Haven and HALO, the area’s homeless shelter.
This year we had so many generous donations from members of the church, clients at Lake House, the Racine Campus Connection at Case New Holland and others that we expanded our gift-giving to the Health Care Network and Next Generation Now.
In all, we donated 198 “stockings” or packages with toiletries and other gifts to these organizations, plus a big box of new toys to the children at HALO before Christmas. After the new year, a very large bag of condoms, plus other generic drug store items, went to the Health Care Network for the start of the new year. Today, Valentine’s Day, we brought the final delivery to Next Generation Now – a brown paper bag of warm gloves, candy and 2008 calendars.
Volunteers gather before Christmas to sort, clean and package the gifts, but the very best part is the blessing. We gather, standing in a circle, and meditate on the non-tangible gifts that we want to imbue. We raise our hands and focus our energies on all the wishes for the recipients of our gifts and speak these blessings aloud:
Faith. Courage. Love. Purpose. Believing people are good. Joy. Beauty. Trust. Confidence. Laughter. Hope.
“The Blessing Of The Gifts” is an annual holiday project of the Lake House Health & Learning Center in cooperation with the members of Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church.
Each year for six years we have collected toiletries, stationery and other small gifts for the Christmas holidays for the incarcerated teen girls at the Southern Oaks Girls School as well as other places where poor and needy people typically seek services, such as the Women’s Resource Center, Bethany Apartments, SAFE Haven and HALO, the area’s homeless shelter.
This year we had so many generous donations from members of the church, clients at Lake House, the Racine Campus Connection at Case New Holland and others that we expanded our gift-giving to the Health Care Network and Next Generation Now.
In all, we donated 198 “stockings” or packages with toiletries and other gifts to these organizations, plus a big box of new toys to the children at HALO before Christmas. After the new year, a very large bag of condoms, plus other generic drug store items, went to the Health Care Network for the start of the new year. Today, Valentine’s Day, we brought the final delivery to Next Generation Now – a brown paper bag of warm gloves, candy and 2008 calendars.
Volunteers gather before Christmas to sort, clean and package the gifts, but the very best part is the blessing. We gather, standing in a circle, and meditate on the non-tangible gifts that we want to imbue. We raise our hands and focus our energies on all the wishes for the recipients of our gifts and speak these blessings aloud:
Faith. Courage. Love. Purpose. Believing people are good. Joy. Beauty. Trust. Confidence. Laughter. Hope.
