Back At It

When I woke up I hit the fitness center this morning to run 3 miles on the treadmill, then before I left for another day at the Operation Christmas Child processing center I read these verses in Isaiah 66:19,20--"I will set a sign among them and will send survivors from them to the nations...to the distant coastlands that have neither heard My fame nor seen My glory. And they will declare My glory among the nations. Then they shall bring all your brethren from all the nations as a grain offering to the Lord, on horses, in chariots, in litters, on mules, and on camels, to My holy mountain Jerusalem." -- reading this reminds me of all the ways our offerings of shoe boxes are brought for God's glory.  Thinking of all those precious boxes being delivered by any means possible made me eager to get back among them at the processing center. 

I had a plan for how my day would go today but, as usual, those plans changed even as the day started.  I got a new associate to work with me today and needed to do some training with her this morning.  

Then...today became the day to do a random inventory on a carton of donated filler items.  So I spent more than an hour counting, recording, and tallying those items on a report list.  

The day started with a few loyal volunteers bagging soap but before I knew it the word came that we had "overflow volunteers" and I had to set up for more folks to sort socks.  That overflow just kept flowing and soon we had six tables of people working on projects.

Thankfully, the new associate was able to direct volunteers in getting bins of fillers filled for the lines because I spent most of my time lifting and hauling cartons of socks and soap and bags and finding boxes to contain all the sorted socks.  

My husband says I need to quit lifting so much stuff, but when the person assigned to help with heavy lifting is stationed on the other side of the warehouse it's just a lot easier to do it myself than to run and get him.  Fortunately, I think most of the really heavy cartons have been emptied now--at 
least until the next pallets of donations arrive.

We're down to 2.5 pallets of soap left to bag and 4 cartons of socks to sort.  The next suggestion is to get bags so we can have volunteers bag the thousands of cute plastic rings we have.  

At least those are easy to carry.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow 'cause we'll be back at it--today we sent out two sea containers full of boxes for Haiti and started filling containers for Ukraine--what joy.