Cardboard Diva

Today was a historic day--the first day for volunteers to process Operation Christmas Child boxes at the new Baltimore processing center.  It was a great day for sure.

My husband is a coach and really enjoyed working with teams of volunteers to inspect boxes.

I spent the day drowning in a sea of cardboard boxes and fillers.

I've been trying to come up with a strategy for managing the fillers.  For example, we have seven pallets of heavy bars of soap.  I don't think we want to ship them back to Boone for storage at the end of the season so I figure we'd better get busy getting some volunteers to bag that soap and get it into boxes.

There are about 12,000 pairs of darling black crocs that need to get into boxes so they can make it to kids around the world, also.  My husband reports, though, that most of the boxes they processed today were already adequately filled.  That's good news, of course, but it leaves me wondering how many fillers we will actually need to use.

Looking at all these cartons and sorting fillers is kind of tempting for a shoe box packing addict.  I'm starting to plan strategies to hide out in the PC some evening and have an all-night packing party.  There's plenty of stuff to make great boxes here.

But (insert large sigh) that's not my job.

It was a special treat at the end of our shift to be greeted by Jim Harrelson and Randy Riddle, both humble leaders of OCC who are amazing models of servant leadership.

 Here Jim is challenging us and sharing briefly from the Word and Randy then prayed over the PC staff.

My husband and I were blessed to speak for a bit with Jim Harrelson and he reminded us of Revelation 7:9,10 and 16,17 -- the scene John describes with people (children and former children!) of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues praising the Lamb and then having that Lamb lead them out as their shepherd "And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

I'll wade through a sea of cardboard and more to see that.