Here are the 4th grade volunteers who helped me with the Operation Christmas Child stuffed animal drive at Belle Valley School. By the end of the day on Friday, February 17th the students had brought in a total of 972 stuffed animals.
I'm very encouraged that this went so smoothly with no parent complaints and that almost all of the animals were new and usable for our big shoebox packing party. The success of this drive has made me pray and strategize about how to get other schools involved in doing collections also.
If I could get 10 more schools to do this and they were all this successful--well, that would take care of almost half of the 20,000 stuffed animals I'm praying for this year.
I've been fighting a cold the past few days and feeling pretty miserable. I've also tried to be a good Operation Christmas Child Area Coordinator and make calls to do 're-ups' on my team members--checking their information and finding out if they still want to continue on the team.
Sadly, I've already had to put one team member on inactive status and another coordinator is thinking about stepping down because of heavy family responsibilities. We're still praying about that. If she does step down that leaves me with just one coordinator on the team.
As I think and pray about my team it's hard not to listen to Satan's jibes as he reminds me of my failures. But I'm going to metaphorically put my fingers in my ears and keep trusting.
I believe God has good plans for our team. Despite the fact that we don't fit the typical Operation Christmas Child high-impact team model yet, God keeps blessing us with more boxes every year.
On the other hand, it would be so much easier if we had a full complement of healthy team members to divide the responsibilities. Somewhere in Erie, Crawford, and Warren counties God is preparing just the right people to partner in this amazing ministry of Operation Christmas Child.
The agony is not knowing who they are.
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