On the Fourth Day

(singing) On the fourth day of National Collection Week my good team gave to me four rolls of wide tape, three carton pallets, two trucks of boxes and an OCC collection victory.

This has been such a short and a long week all at the same time. I was thinking today of all the distractions and unusual events that have made this week challenging in addition to Operation Christmas Child. For example, one of my schools was one of two in the whole county to be randomly selected to have the Health Department audit my immunization records--and of course it was this week. There have been several unusual accidents at school and a heavy load of health screenings to conquer.

In the midst of it, though, God has made every challenge work out so well. I can almost sense the answered prayer all around me.

After work today I rushed up to the storage container to load as many shoeboxes as I could into my minivan to get them to the collection center to fill the truck before it's pulled tomorrow. It was snowing and windy and I was fighting to load my car when our Chick-fil-A owner drove up and asked if he could help. What a difference it made to get those boxes loaded so quickly.

Came home to do a radio interview and had it delayed by half an hour which gave me time to do some laundry and make dinner. Then my husband offered to go to the collection center with me to drop off the 300 or so boxes in my car.

We ended up helping with the cartonizing and loading the truck. AND we RAN OUT OF CARTONS already tonight! It's a great problem but still another challenge as we put out an SOS to relay centers for extras to return and started packing shoeboxes into egg cartons so we could get that truck filled.

Ahh, what a great fourth day!