Recently we had a situation with Dani that turned into quite the learning opportunity!
The last two years she has had the opportunity to go to Disney World with choir at school. The trip is at a great price, but still upwards of $500-600 per year. Last year she raised a total of $1 towards her trip and we and her mom split the cost of her trip. This year we had an understanding that she would help more towards raising the money through the fundraisers and turns out she raised a total of $5 this year!! While her profit did quadruple in size....she still didn't contribute near what we had hoped she would.
Her mom called us one night close to when the trip money was due concerned that Dani was becoming ungrateful for things she has and that she doesn't appreciate things we do give her because she is just used to getting everything she needs or wants. We assured her that we felt like that wasn't the case but that we would have a conversation with her about it to make sure.
Josh opened up the conversation and asked why she hadn't raised the money to go on the Disney trip like other kids did, some paying for their whole trip through fundraising. She replied "because they don't have parents that can afford to pay for their whole trip"!!
Woah!!! That was the WRONG answer....just a simple question turned into a 2 hours conversation about what being grateful means, how undeserving she is of the things she gets in relation to God's love for us and Jesus dying on the cross. It was intense and concluded with her assignment for Josh to even consider letting her go on the trip was 1. she had to come up with a list of how she was going to raise the money back over the summer and 2. somehow make him believe that she is grateful for the things she has and appreciates all we do for her.
You can see she wrote a nice apology letter and then came up with a detailed plan of how to raise the money back over the next few months. In the end she was allowed to go to Disney world, and hopefully this was a learning lesson for her that she will always remember.
I am sure there are many more lessons to learn......stay tuned!
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