Yesterday, we had a concert to benefit Katrina victims. Being from Gulfport, MS, it was a project very dear to my heart. I wanted to help the people of the gulf coast get their lives back together.

The plan was to fill a truck full of things along with a bunch of money and drive to my beloved hometown. My husband and I were going to rent a UHaul truck and personally go to the coast since we now reside in Kansas. When I called about renting a truck, I found out that it would be $1800 just for the truck rental!!!!! Not to mention gas to travel a thousand miles.

This was to be the first of several concerts so that once the initial shock was over, people would continue to get help. We started out at a small church to see what kind of response we would get and next month we were going to a big sports center at Wichita State University.

My pastor and his wife had suffered through a flood and lost a home in 98, so they were very compassionate and wanted to help. The ladies in the church started putting together small care packages.

I decided since Saturday is typically a busy day for people that I would have the concert be a come and go event from 1 to 7 PM with a variety of talent on the roster.

I had scheduled Jewish singers with Davidic dancers, a Christian rock band, a gospel singer, a praise and worship leader, a country gospel singer, along with several male and female contemporary Christian singers.

The most we had in the church at any one time was about 40 people.

Most of those were the performers!

Everyone that attended said they enjoyed my selection of talent.

When I opened up the donation boxes, we had less than $150 in them. I decided that we would use that money to ship the small amount of donations that we had. We had only collected enough stuff to put on top of an 8 foot table.

It was hardly worth driving down there. I even had a friend offer to let us use his trailer that he uses to transport his band equipment.