Empty Ark

The ark is empty! Yep, this is pretty much what our storage container looks like now. God provided a 'just right' number of volunteers who worked tirelessly for more than an hour to unload a 40 ft. long space crammed with boxes of supplies and bags of animals for our Operation Christmas Child packing party. And a donation of Beanie Babies today put us over the 16,000 mark for stuffed animals.

Someone on Facebook wanted to know what 16,000 stuffed animals look like. Well, right now they look like a mountain of garbage bags and we'll just unload them one at a time so we'll never really see all 16,000 at one time.

There were some glitches today. I found out we still need a volunteer to run sound for our speaker at the packing party, the event isn't listed on the church's website calendar, and we weren't scheduled to use the worship center. Ah, well--just more communications problems--but it will all work out, I know.

On the positive side, we had good coverage with a nice-sized article about the event in Saturday's paper and another blurb in the editorial section. We're praying that God will bring the volunteers He wants to have there.

So now the countdown begins. Every evening this week we'll be working to set up for the packing party on Saturday.

Meanwhile, the animals are glad to be out of the ark and waiting patiently for the next leg of their journey.