Boxing It Up

It's a dreary rainy Saturday so I decided to clean my house in an unorthodox but effective way.  I gathered all the stray shoebox items around my house and actually packed them into 10 shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child.

These are the first I packed this season.  Four weeks ago we had our huge packing party, and even though 21,106 were packed that weekend--not one of them was packed by me.

So today I went back to the basics and lovingly put the bags of candy, the soap and crayons and toothbrushes into those boxes.  I hugged and prayed over those special dolls with the sweet faces I'd been saving and excitedly packed the baseball glove with the Disney baseball.

Sometimes I can almost forget what drew me to this ministry in the first place.  I'm getting ready to speak at a church tomorrow and folding boxes and praying over the upcoming National Collection Week and the Chick-fil-A promotion.  And in the midst of all the busyness I forget that it all started with those three shoeboxes I packed in 1995.

I forget sometimes that it's not about making the goal of 40,000 boxes for Northwestern PA or 800,000 for the Mid-Atlantic region or 6.5 million in the US or 9.1 million worldwide.

It's crazy, but I can forget sometimes that ONE box goes to ONE child with ONE soul.  I really needed to pack those ten boxes today and remind myself again.

On the other hand, when you get all those boxes together they bless millions of souls one at a time and we need to pray that God will bring in those millions--one by one.

Hurricane Sandy is predicted to hit our Mid-Atlantic area soon--an area that is poised to collect 800,000 or more shoeboxes just two weeks from now by God's grace.  We know that God is sovereign but we also know that He commands us to pray.

Those boxes are getting boxed up and they need to be collected and sent on their way.  Will you pray with us that nothing, including a 'storm of the century', will interfere with this important ministry?