Holiday meeting schedule

The meetings for November and December will be slightly different than normal.

Nov 10th 6-8 pm

Dec 1st 6-8 pm

Dec 6th 7:00 pm Angel of Hope Downtown Fayetteville

Dec 15th 6-8 pm Potluck party

Dec 29th 6-8 pm

Meetings return to normal in January 2010

Angel of Hope

On the 6th of December, this year as every year, there will be a memorial service in downtown Fayetteville. It will be held in front of the Angel of Hope statue at the park, at 7pm. Similar statues are in more than 60 cities around the country. Fayetteville’s statue is the only one in North Carolina, according to the SHARE program’s Web site. Fayetteville joins approximately 30 other cities around the United States in this special annual remembrance of these special lives. Candles and carnations will be provided or families may bring their own flowers.

Lori Farmer, a nurse who has organized the ceremony in the past and helped bring the statue to Fayetteville, hopes the ceremony helps parents who have lost children realize they are not alone. Farmer also lost a child, but her mission to bring families to the Angel of Hope reaches beyond her grief. She says families in mourning need to have a place to remember their children.

"It doesn't matter whether you are 20 years old and lost a child or 90 and lost a child, the grief is still there," she says. "The pain is there forever."

“I hope they leave here feeling like they are not alone and like these little lives are never forgotten.”
The Angel of Hope Monument was introduced in a book by Richard Paul Evans, The Christmas Box. Although the book was a work of fiction, the original statue once existed in Salt Lake City and was thought to have been destroyed. After the publication of his book, Evans heard reports that parents who had lost a child were seeking the Angel as a place to mourn and honor the memory of their beloved children. He then commissioned a statue based on the description in his book. Replicas of this statue have been placed in other communities in the United States and others are planned world wide.