If you have visited my blog before, you will know that I am a people person. I love helping others, I love positive words, I love making a difference whenever I can. Social media has let me do more of that from the comfort of my home office. Right now it is the Thanksgiving Sharathon at my favorite Christian radio station, www.89q.org. I don’t work to music very often but when I do, it is Christian radio or contemporary Christian artists. Lately, I’ve been back to turning on 89Q again.
Today listening to the Sharathon, I am hearing friends on the radio. Coy Sawyer, the General Manager, invited me to his Christian Business Leader breakfast about 2 years ago. Within the last couple of hours, I have not only heard Coy and his announcers, Ken Bishop and Matt Deane, but Dave Olson from Sons of the Carpenter and Architectural Millwork as well as Rimon Moses from RMM Solutions both of whom are in our leader breakfast group. I’m loving sharing the current challenges through Facebook and Twitter and knowing that people can pledge all over the world now through the website and better yet, people can listen all over the world now through the website.
The long story about Coy Sawyer started when he was with another station in Marshfield. I used to listen when my children were little and I mailed in a prayer request. Times were really tough back then and we had just lost both of our property management jobs on a project in Naperville, Illinois and moved back to Wausau to start over. We managed to buy a really small house and were struggling to remodel it. I just wanted people to pray that we would have work back then, a prayer I still pray. But instead, apparently Coy read my request on air and we received a $100 check from the station because some listener wanted to help.
When Coy moved to 89Q, I offered to be a business sponsor. When that was hard for us, Coy came up with a way for me to help that didn’t cost me cash. He was starting a tabloid-like newsletter that was syndicated and printed in Grand Rapids, MI but the local sections and the ads had to be created here. I learned Quark to help Coy create ads and other desktop publishing. We worked together every quarter for several years, designing ads and laying out content. I learned skills in desktop publishing that I later transferred to things I did for Wausau Whitewater and Kiwanis. Later the newsletter turned into a locally designed and printed publication done by Sun Printing but for a long time Coy was a quarterly visitor.
With all that, you can see that I have strong ties to 89Q. If you have never checked them out, go to 89Q and visit. If you are reading this during Sharathon, the pledge line is 888-638-9250, manned from 6am to 6pm CST.
Even in the worst possible economy, 89Q had support from many people and reached the $165,000 goal and beyond a half hour before the end of Sharathon! Now they can have Thanksgiving!