You can only post so much about the empty storage container and the lack of items.
I'm still praying about whether God wants us to host a large packing party this year. A few months ago I was certain that He did and now... not completely. When things are slow going it's hard to know if God is asking us to wait on Him and push through or if He is closing doors.
Through the intervention of another Operation Christmas Child volunteer I was able to purchase 18,158 washcloths at a pretty good price. But now I have to figure out how to get them here from the other end of the state.
We have paper. We have washcloths. We have some leftover pencils. We have 1350 stuffed animals.
We have little else.
We do have 11,000 coloring books, but I found out they are not acceptable for the special boxes we pack at our large packing party. We'll be giving them to folks who are having regular OCC packing parties in our area or sending them to the processing center as fillers. So I keep telling myself that all the hauling of them is worth it. They will still make some children happy. But they won't be filling the corners of empty boxes at a large packing party.
No news...it's not necessarily good news.
I know you are frustrated and hurting, feeling like God isn't going to use you in this area this year. Look at what is going on in your life, could he be telling you to send items as fillers this year, instead of a large packing party? Does he mean for your focus to be elsewhere? Perhaps your ability to get lots of awesome individual items is what he has for you personally this time. Or perhaps he's prodding someone else in your area to assist or takeover. He knows what we need, sometimes, we just have to figure that out.
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