Cookies For Africa

Our third son was delivered on July 9, 2010

by a birth mother whom we hold in the highest honor and to whom we owe our deepest appreciation.

6lbs, 13oz, 20 inches

Named Joshua Lee

Home as a Hadeed July 11, 2010

Praise God!

I was standing hunched over my laptop when I received this request, too rushed to sit down for a quick Inbox check – skim, delete, skim, set aside to read more carefully, skim, quick response… Then I read the email containing this cookie request and stopped cold. Here is what it said:

“…I’m looking to place another order – a very special order. We have heart parents who sadly lost their little girl at 4 months of age and they are celebrating what would be her 1st birthday on Saturday, May 22nd.”

I panicked a little bit. In truth, every time I hear about the death of a child, I panic a little bit, because I know how easily it could be any child, Jack or Marcus in particular. I also panicked a bit because I didn’t think I could do justice to this event, and even if I could, would it be awkward? Would a gift of flowers and butterflies on such an sad occasion offend the grieving parents?

I was thinking about Carsyn’s parents and about this order while on a run one morning. From somewhere within my memory came the verse Psalm 116:15, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints”. The grief of a parent testifies to the pricelessness of a child. Carsyn was everything to her parents that my children are to me. And she is so special to God that even her death was precious in His sight. How foolish of me to imagine that a gift honoring her would offend her parents. Of course not! It makes perfect sense to, in the donor’s words, “celebrate” Carsyn and the very short months she had with her parents.

The donor shared more about Carsyn and I’d like to honor her by sharing it with you:

Carsyn Presley Buchmann was born on May 22nd, 2009 with a congenital heart defect called Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrom. Carsyn was born with 1/2 of a heart. After Two open heart surgeries, Carsyn was listed for a heart transplant which she received on July 27th, 2009. After fighting for nearly four months, She passed away from complications of a stroke. Carsyn spent her entire life in the Cardiac ICU at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin.

Please pray with me for comfort for Carsyn’s parents and for the donor too, who herself lost a child to congenital heart disease. Carsyn’s parents have set up a foundation named “The Wings of Angels”, which you can read about or donate to here.

Thanks, Stephanie, for the lesson you taught me, that it is always comforting for a parent to honor their child. And thank you for the donation, which purchased two nets that may save other children from malaria, and save their parents from the grief that Carsyn’s parents suffer.

This picture depicts a cute, quick little project doesn’t it? Ahh, my friends, if only that were true… I would have been a lot less tired at Jack’s preschool graduation.

The project started just like any other – an order of 80 cookies from an absolutely delightful and encouraging staff member at Chapelgate PCA, the church that graciously allows me to use their licensed, insured kitchen, and invited me to speak about malaria and Child Alive at a recent event. The order was for Sunday School teachers so we worked from a “sowing the word” theme – hence the watering cans and seeds.

If this were in a gallery, we would title it “World’s Most Impractical Cookie Cutter”. Can you imagine what happened when I attempted to lift cookie #1 of 80 onto the baking sheet? And consider the baking time differential between that skinny spout and the rest of the cookie. Even if I properly managed those difficulties, how in the world would I transport 80 of those ridiculously delicate cookies from Chapelgate to home for decoration, back to Chapelgate for the the donor, and eventually to the final recipients?? What was I thinking when I ordered it??? As we tell our kids sometimes – I was NOT thinking.

I really had no choice but to reshape each of the watering can cookies into the final shape above before transferring them to the baking sheet. Generally I can cut out 300-400 cookies in an evening at Chapelgate. This particular evening, I barely managed 120.

Believe it or not, the cookie cutter fiasco was my *second* major mistake on this project. The first was all too typical for me – I spoke before thinking. When brainstorming ideas, I mentioned that if we chose this theme, I could do 80 bags of two cookies each – seeds and watering cans together. “Wouldn’t that be cute?” I thought naively. For an order of a dozen or a couple dozen, doing a complementary cookie is not a big deal and I often do it. But that flippant offer turned an order of 80 cookies into an order of 160 cookies! To quote Dana Carvey quoting George Bush, “Not prudent”.

As I type this, it occurs to me that there is a third major mistake going here – I never got an invoice out on this order! But… when I get it out and the check comes back, we will have earned about 8 more nets for those who desperately need them. No matter how poorly a project goes, whenever I write that last paragraph, it all seems worth it. It is.

Bonus pictures that were mixed up in this batch of downloads:

This was an order that I rushed through in about 12 hours… and I think you can tell. I was a little overly excited about the new technique that saved the day on the Yoder HVAC cookies. But in this case, the swords would have been better piped free-hand. Also, there just wasn’t room for all the words on these small cookies. I should have spoken up with the donor or selected a much larger cookie. AND the cookies were too brown around the edges. Anyhow, I happened to be at this party (why am I *never* at the parties for the sets that I’m really proud of?) and was completely tickled to hear a grown man rejoicing over receiving cookies with “pirate swords” on them. Never mind that they were supposed to be medieval swords

But guess what? Perfection or not, this order earned another five nets for the vulnerable in Africa. And that’s something to rejoice over!