WHY
We’ve all had life-altering moments that change our perspective forever. It may have been the unexpected loss of a parent or child, a health crisis that left you forever scarred and unable to do what once came so easily to you or maybe it was facing a natural disaster and losing every earthly possession that you own. It’s these defining moments when we remember the fragility of life and how everything can change in the blink of an eye.
Over the last decade, our family has had more of these moments than we thought we would face in our lifetime and we know we’re not alone. We haven’t welcomed these casualties into our lives, but they were ordained for us. At times they have been extremely costly, but they have done something extraordinary in our hearts. They have lifted our eyes to look beyond what we can see. They have given us a propensity to wonder about, hope for and to seek hard after the things that will truly last. The things that don’t break, don’t wear out, don’t fade, don’t decompose and don’t die... the eternal things.
We are not alone in this longing to see redemption in action. We have friends and family that have linked arms with us and have chosen to believe in the things that we can’t see. The healing from a debilitating disease that hasn’t happened yet, the child that hasn’t been conceived or welcomed into their forever home, the community that hasn’t been restored, the broken marriages and broken lives that exist all around with no road to recovery in sight. We believe that God has set eternity in every human heart and that we’re all wired with an innate desire to do what lasts.
The most recent perspective shifting moment for me was in September 2017, when the eyewall of Hurricane Irma passed directly over my childhood home with myself, my parents, my pregnant wife and my two-year-old little girl huddled inside an interior bathroom. After a sleepless and terrifying night, we walked away mostly unscathed. Yes, we lost electricity and water for over a week and some grand old oak trees, but in the aftermath of this storm, the damage was minimal compared to what our neighbors in other parts of Florida and the Caribbean endured. Gratitude welled up in our hearts that we survived and a desire to care for those in more desperate situations than we were was born. We knew we wanted to make a significant contribution to the hurricane relief efforts happening around our home state and so the #DoWhatLasts shop was born.
We’ve partnered with some of our good friends who also happen to be super-talented creatives to design the first collection of #DoWhatLasts products. A percentage of the sales from these goods will directly fund the continued hurricane relief efforts happening in the Bahamas, Florida panhandle, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and the Caribbean. This is only the beginning. We hope that this is the start of a perpetual effort to fund eternal work happening in our city, our state and around the world.
- Danny Rohrdanz