Sharathon 2007

This past Wednesday through Friday was "Sharathon", our yearly pledge drive. We had some very lofty goals, but the leadership believed they were attainable. Last year we broke the record of most money raised by a Christian fundraiser in three days. This year, we broke our own record. The totals aren't final, but for the second straight year, God blessed us through our givers...over five million dollars! How great is our God?! The old Andre Crouch song "My Tribute", has been the station's "song" for all of the 25 years it's been around, but with it being such a dated song, they wanted to update it. First person the leadership had in mind to redo the song...Israel Houghton and The New Breed. It was debuted during the last day of Sharathon and he did a phenomenal job with the remake, including a small snippet of Chris Tomlin's "How Great Is Our God" at the end. It was a perfect song to end the three days, and the excitement of seeing God bless us again. These three days are our most stressful, yet exciting, of the whole year. So many things depend on Brent and I getting them right, and making sure that if something goes wrong, that we get on top of it and get it taken care of. We had so many things actually go wrong right before it started that we were probably all close to heart attacks! Our webserver crashed the around midnight...six hours before it was all to start. That server housed all of our online donation taking ability, our webcams we set up, and our main Sharathon website. Our entire phone system went down around 3am...three hours before it was about to begin. And then a host of other smaller things popped up. PC monitors blacking out. PC's not starting up. Various other websites not opening because of coding issues. Etc etc etc. All of the major issues were fixed before or shortly after we began this year's Sharathon, and nothing major happened during. All of the minor issues were very minor, and we had enough equipment to handle it all. I think God was testing us. We were stressing something fierce...especially us engineering/IT guys...but everything worked amazingly well once we got going. The monetary amounts didn't look like they were going to be reached at one point. I remember how fast we made our goals last year, and how we had so much time left in our three days of fundraising to raise money for our "Above and beyond" funds, and thinking about how there's no way we can hit that mark this year. We hit it early evening on Friday (the last day), and still were able to raise around $250,000 more! I'll be shocked if we don't get the raise we were telling them we want.

All in all though, I think God was trying to let us know that we worry too much...to sit back and let the blessings He was about to give us really sink in...to show us how much He is in control, and that even if things go down, He'll still get accomplished what He wants to accomplish. Here is a video, and then some pics of all the fun! The video was just uploaded at 2pm (Sunday the 24th), so it might take a bit for it to be fully ready to go on youtube.