My work packing Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes involves a lot of counting. Today is an exciting day because I met my crayon count. Since Toys R Us had an ad this week with Crayola crayons on sale at 4/$1.00 I was able to get WalMart to price match their ad. By God's grace WalMart had lots of crayons on the shelves so I only had to go to 2 stores to get the 1400 I wanted this week. This is a great answer to prayers prayed by my team and now we should have enough to put a bag of 8 crayons in each box we pack at our packing party on September 24th. Any extras we have donated will be used in case we pack more boxes than we anticipate and, guess what--this ALWAYS happens.
Last week I ordered 24,000 pens and they arrived at Grace Church on Thursday--the one day I was out of town. The staff at the church was great about unloading them from the truck and I'm excited because the quality of the pens is great. Now I only need about 5,000 more pens (yes, I AM counting).
The 1,000 pencils I got at Staples last week for a total of only $1.25 by using my teacher's card gets us half-way to the goal. I think we just need 15,000 more.
And God is filling up the Ark week by week. Last week's total was 550 and Hill Memorial United Methodist Church in Bradford, PA has a bunch that they collected at their VBS last week also. I'd say we only need about 3000 or 3500 more.
In the middle of all this counting, a friend whose daughter had brain surgery this week reminded me that God counts our tears. How amazing! My tears usually run like rivers, don't yours? Only the God of the universe could see and count each one. Every tear I cry alone is known to Him.
Every tear cried by a child in the world who is hungry or abandoned or lacking even what we consider basic necessities of life is seen and counted by our loving God. And because He loves us so much He gives us the opportunity to join Him in bringing hope and joy and turning many of the tears of those children into smiles. That's something that really makes life count.
Who's counthing? God is!
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