Hello friends! It has been a wonderful busy month for Armor Up, and we are so excited to share what has happened in the past month, our plans for the upcoming months, and our goals that we are working towards. We would like to highlight our new Amazon Smile registration, and our Christmas Celebration for the women.
Events in the Past Month
Christmas Celebration in our Recovery Homes
Lelita and Ashley, the owners of Recovery Life Apparel, held a fundraiser and were able to bless every woman at Victory House and Freedom House with a beautiful Christmas. They supplied the houses with fully decorated Christmas trees, and every woman received a stocking filled with goodies such as gift cards and a beautiful robe. We are truly grateful from the bottom of our hearts. You can read more about this event here.
The women were also able to give their children beautiful Christmas gifts thanks to our supporters TJ and April with Action Church. The women were able to take pride and were so overjoyed to be able to give their kids some amazing gifts for Christmas. They even supplied all of the wrapping paper and supplies.
We had a Christmas party for all of the women with a white elephant gift exchange, door prizes, games, and food. We hosted an ornament decorating contest and costume contest that everyone enjoyed participating in. There was lots of laughter and everyone had a great time. What a joy it was to be able to show these women how to have fun without drugs or alcohol.
Christmas Outreach
The Christmas outreach was a huge success, thank you for all who donated and supported out outreach in the streets. From your donations and financial support, we were able to hand out over 150 toys, blankets, and bibles in the streets of Orlando. We were able to show the people how much they are loved, remembered, and highly thought of, by us and by Jesus, and there were several salvations. There will now be several more people in heaven for all eternity, which is the most important thing of all.
A New Year, Sober and Clean
We had a New Years party at Victory House full of food, fun, and fireworks. For a lot of these women, it was their first sober New Years in a long long while, and we had a blast celebrating.
January Speaker of the Month: Lauri Jean from Action Church – Goal Setting
For the New Year, we worked on Goal Setting. It is an important part of recovery to set real, attainable goals and work to accomplish them. We had a speaker, Lauri Jean from Celebrate Recovery, come and teach an Oola goal setting class. The class teaches daily and monthly goals, as well as dreams and long term goals. It also helps give these women tools for realistic goal setting, and teaches how to perform the daily action steps needed to achieve these goals.
We then put these lessons to use with a workshop party where we put our goals for the year on poster board and painted our word for the year on canvas. This exercise helped these women to develop their goals, put them in writing, and speak life over their lives to set their sights on accomplishing them.
Improvements to our Homes
Our partners at Action Church came to Freedom House and Victory House to help us improve the homes. They pressure washed, performed major yard clean up, and built two new swings. The houses look better than ever, and the women are grateful and proud to call it their home.
The pastor of Action Church came to meet the women, making them feel very valued and cared for. The prayer team anointed and prayed over the houses and every woman there. We were blown away by the power and presence of God through these amazing volunteers and the anointed prayer team. Lives were touched and changed that day in a major way. The day ended by us all kneeling in prayer and all saying the prayer of salvation. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts
Upcoming
Further Recovery Home Improvements
Our partners at Action Church will be visiting again on February 20th to continue the work to improve our homes. The homes will be getting a fresh coat of paint inside and out, and some general repairs and electrical work. We are always working to improve Freedom House and Victory House, and are excited for this upcoming work.
Register with Armor Up on Amazon Smile!
We are happy to announce that we are now registered on Amazon Smile! This way, you can help financially support Armor Up with just your usual Amazon purchases. It is super simple, here is how:
- Go to Smile.Amazon.com
- Sign in to your amazon account
- Register your charity as Armor Up Inc.
- Whenever you purchase on Amazon, purchase from smile.amazon.com
Amazon will donate 0.5% of the purchase price to Armor Up. We really do rely on your donations, and this can make a huge impact for our organization to allow us to do so much more for these women.
Outreach
Our February outreach project will be working to improve our community with positivity and art. We will be painting stones with encouraging scriptural messages, praying over them, and setting them around town to be found by members of the community.
Baptisms
Several women in our homes have chosen to get baptized next month, and we are so excited for them. Baptism represents a changed heart and is an inward expression of rededication and surrendering to Jesus and an outward expression of being cleansed of all past sins and a new beginning with Christ as our center. Baptism is a personal choice, and while not all of our women choose to be baptized, the ones that do find baptism to be a big step in their recovery process as they surrender their wills and ways and past for God’s total healing and redemption in all that He has for their future.
2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation, the old has gone and the new has come we are a new creation
We will keep you updated on this event as more details unfold.
February Speaker of the Month
We are currently working with this month’s speaker to establish a date and time to come work with the girls. Look out for more news on this coming very soon!
Goals
We are always working to better Armor Up. Some of our goals from this month include continuing our Speaker of the Month, Outreach Event of the Month, and improving our houses with Action Church.
We are also fundraising this month, with our goal to raise enough money to maintain the high level of quality of service we supply to these women, including all of our events, workshops, outreaches, classes, bibles, and resources, so that our efforts can be turned towards further growth of Armor Up. If you are able, please consider donating. We are so grateful for all of our supporters. You help make Armor Up great.
Get Involved
As always, we rely on your support to make these things happen. If you have it in your heart to give, please visit our get involved page to see ways that you can help us support our mission.