Henley's 3rd Chiari Surgery

I can not even begin to unpack all that has happened over the past 15 days. I feel like my life shifted into hyper drive the minute we were told Henley needed another surgery. The logistical circus of planning a major out of state surgery is mind boggling. I spent an entire week making phone calls to teachers, administrators, extracurricular instructors and therapist in effort to come up with a plan and a time frame for all the things. The plane tickets, lodging challenges in Manhattan, insurance hurdles.... its a lot. In addition to that, the girls competed in a horse show. More on that later.

Since posting my last post, I have heard from literally hundreds of you. It's overwhelming in the best way and I know that the Lord is using you to remind me that He is right here with us in the mess. So thank you. Thank you for reading all of my words and going down this path again with us. More than anything, thank you for praying.

Several of you remember that 6 years ago, this very month, we decided to do a fundraiser for our trip because of the enormous cost involved in a surgery like this and all of the things that insurance does not cover. A friend of ours gave us the idea of selling t-shirts to raise money and to ask people to wear the shirts on the day of Henley’s surgery in support. Adam and I sat in the waiting room in New York while Henley was in surgery and were reminded over and over again that even though we were a thousand miles away from our family, our support system and our home, our community was back at home standing with us. The Lord used you that day, in ways you may never even know this side of Heaven. Thank you.

As the Lord does, He often shows us just how small our faith is and orchestrates things we could never make happen on our own. During that time, we raised more than enough money through your personal donations, church matching gifts and buying of Brave merchandise, that we took the leftover money and started an official 501c3 non-profit to be able to pay it forward and help other families who were in a similar situation. Since then, we have been able to provide financial support and assistance for several families in need and community support for countless more. I think, there is no time like the present to do it again! So we are going to order another batch of Brave Shirts NEXT WEEK. If you don't already have one, or need a new size because your child (like ours) has doubled in size since they wore one, you can go right now to www.bravecampaign.com and purchase a Brave shirt to wear alongside of us on Feb 22nd in support of Henley. The proceeds from the sale of your shirt (or donation if you don't want a shirt) will go to Brave Campaign and the funds will be used to support families in need. And as the Lord does in His perfect timing, just this past week we have learned of two families whose children will also be having brain surgery in the next 6 weeks and are in need of support. Would you help us knock it out of the park and do some big things for these families?

SOME IMPORTANT DETAILS:

1. If you would like to get a Brave Shirt in time to wear it with us on Feb 22nd, your order HAS to be in the system by midnight on Jan 26th. That is ONE WEEK from today. We have to have our order placed with them by January 27th to guarantee that we can get them out to everyone before we leave for New York. (If you would like to help us distribute shirts, we will have some pickup locations that need a person to handle those)

2. We have had the question before in the past if we can run a custom color for an organization to wear (aka, baseball team colors, business logo colors etc). We can make this happen, but there is a minimum order for colors outside of our usual purple and white. Please email us at bravecampaign@gmail.com to discuss.