Grateful For A Playground Encounter

This being a new venue for me, I have no idea to what level I will be blogging but have felt compelled to write something about this woman and her family, who I’ve only met once. I promised her I’m not a stalker when we agreed to exchange Facebook info, and I hope I’m living up to that, but modern technology is amazing and I’ve been able to follow some of what her family is going through and doing through her blog site and Facebook page as well.

First a little background on how we met. As I’ve mentioned before, we recently moved to Raleigh, NC for my husband’s job, a place where I have no clue about, where anything is or how to get around. For instance the other day I asked my husband how to get somewhere and he said “Take the inner beltline.” My response was, or course in panic, “Just tell me if it’s 540 or 440!” Once he told me, I realized, I still didn’t know which one was where anyway and had to get explicit directions on how to get to “the inner beltline.”

Well, lucky for my kids and myself there is a playground at a park right outside of the community we live in – very easy to find. On a warm winter day I decided to take the boys there for some play time. While there, a nice lady and her family sat down at the table with us at lunch time. We started talking, as I’ve learned to do with strangers lately since often strangers are the only adult conversations I get to be a part of until my husband gets home at night. I found her to be pleasant to speak with and sort of in passing in the conversation she mentioned to me that their family is adopting a special needs child from Taiwan. I told her that I thought they must be very special people to take that on, but little did I know just how special. Well, since she also lives in the community we live in we decided to exchange Facebook info and went on our ways home for nap time for our little boys.

While at home I sent her a “friend request” and then got to look up a little more about her. Turns out she has a blog called “Dinglefest”. How interesting to me since I just started blogging, so I thought I would check it out. Here is where I now suggest anyone with a heart check out her Dinglefest blog. This lovely lady’s name is Shannon Dingle. She is documenting her family’s road to bringing home their new baby Zoe Amanda with Cerbral Palsey from Taiwan. Not only do they have beautiful hearts, clearly influenced by the Glory of God, but they have God Himself working to help them down this path they have chosen to follow. The fund raising that has occurred for them to get their little girl home is proof alone of His miracles. They have to raise $23,000, quickly, and started fund raising through their friends online. I watched them go from a few hundred dollars to around $1,500 in one day through their friends and the internet. They only had 2 days to come up with that money and didn’t know if it would happen, yet amazingly they raised those funds early. They have reached half of their goal now, around $13,000 which even includes a friend selling their car to make a monetary donation, and are planning on doing a few more fund raisers in the month of March, stopping at the end of March because they don’t want to be a “nuisance” to their friends.

Please, do read this amazing story and journey. People like this don’t come along every day, at least not to me. I constantly am wishing I could do more in this world, be more, share God’s glory more, and never can figure out where my place is in it all. Maybe today it’s just to share the message of one ordinary family doing extraordinary things, with God’s love showing them the way.

Go to http://www.dinglefest.com/ for more.