My "tickets to emuna" story

I sent this story about what happened to me to Mr. Shmuel Greenbaum who runs Partners in Kindness and he sent it out last month. Since I heard it's good to publicize these types of stories, that's what I'm doing.

I had just finished having complaints against an institution for a sort of silly reason and realized I shouldn't let these things get to me. Then I got a call from my credit card company that someone had gotten hold of my number and started charging things to it. They caught it immediately and I never got charged anything, even though if I had it would have been reimbursed.

I was very grateful to G-d for this. Then that day I got a pack of tickets to sell for my kids' school's annual raffle. I had recently heard a video by Rabbi Fischel Schacter where he said in life, you can have complaints or keep on going forward.

So I said enough complaining, I want to try to sell these for G-d because it says somewhere that giving tzedaka (charity) is something you can "give back" to H-shem since it's giving to His children. If He wants to make this successful He will, and however many I sell, I will and if not, not.

I felt like by changing my attitude and trying to put into place what I have been trying to absorb about faith, I saw results in this project. In attempting to sell the tickets, I tried to do what made sense to me, but missing the usual worry I put myself through with doing things. I also got encouragement from the people around me like my husband and my neighbor, telling me not to feel guilty asking people, etc. since it's for a good cause.

With G-d's help we sold all of the tickets we had and I really felt throughout that G-d was "carrying" it. I emailed and called people but I don't have too much experience with this and I really felt like He did the whole thing.

Even though we learn that He does everything, this time I really felt it. That made me grateful for the other experience that I had complaints about as well as the credit card situation (it was interesting sending people to pay via paypal when I myself had no credit card to use in the interim) because it led to this personal breakthrough for me.

The 3rd part to this story - Most of the people who bought raffle tickets from me have little or no connection to my kids' school. Recently my husband had donated to another school that we really have no connection to either other than that they are both religious schools. I told over the story to the tzedaka collector for that school and he seemed unsurprised and said "that's the way these things usually go."