Again!

God did it.  Again!

Well, of course we knew He would.  That's what faith is.  But it still delights me in a new way each time.

To see God move throughout this Operation Christmas Child packing party weekend leaving His fingerprints on every detail is incredible.

There are too many stories to tell in one blog but so many of them are strange sequels that live over and over each year.

I don't know why it works this way, but it always seems the thing I feel I have plenty of is the first item we run out of.  This year it was pens.  I left extra pens at home this morning because I KNEW we had plenty.  Go ahead and laugh.

And all that angst I had over the past weeks when I couldn't figure out why the records didn't jive and I thought I was short 1,000 boxes of crayons.  Well---there were two large boxes of bagged crayons left over.

Because she read on my blog that I was nervous about running out of soap, Amy Gibson brought extra soap from Cleveland and saved the day on that front.

Oh...and the stuffed animals?  Well, once again I'm not sure how that happened exactly, but even though my last records showed we were short by 3,000-4,000 we had enough right up until the end.

Pam Dumont from Erie Christian Fellowship Church prayed and hunted and eBay-shopped for them right up until last night with a final count of 3,500.  She was washing them through the night last night.

And there were the usual logistics snafus.  We ran out of boxes.  Again.

We ran out of cartons.  Again.

We only had room on the truck because we piled 12 of the stacks of cartons six high.

There were many, many times when I just couldn't get a handle on what was going on.  And there were stretches of time when I hid in the corner praying while I worked on inspecting radios to be put into boxes (another story).

We struggled all day to have enough fillers and then ended up with 2,000 leftover radios and cases of paddleballs.  Again.

Even with all the chaos the whole packing event was finished before 2:30 pm.

And.....

The trucks have a grand total of 22,490 precious gift-filled shoe boxes on them.  Oh, and there was one more box that was found late and never made it into the cartons on the truck.  Again.

Thank you all for your encouragement, your messages, and most important of all--your prayers.

In these two days a community of 650-700 volunteers from 39 different churches and 13 community organizations, supported by the prayers of believers around the country,  joined in watching God do what only He could do.

Again.