Roping It In

As you can see from this picture, I'm not at the end of my rope.  A generous donor (who shall remain anonymous to keep you all from stalking) donated thousands of jump rope handles so we can make jump ropes for our 2015 Operation Christmas Child packing party boxes.

I still need to order a larger supply of rope, but for right now I've been getting 600 ft. spools at the local Harbor Freight store.  Then I cut 7.5 foot lengths, thread each end into a handle, and tie a knot.  I know these will not only bring lots of fun for the children who receive them but will also undoubtedly be very useful for other purposes as well.

So today I watched a simulcast with six speakers talking about discipleship while I put together 78 jump ropes.

Now if I do this every day from now until the packing party I will only be a few thousand jump ropes short of what we need.

Or...I could get some help from some other folks and get them done even sooner.  I'm hoping that's what will happen.  I already have a family from another church who've volunteered to do this as a family service project and have been working hard on them.

Meanwhile, we had our first Operation Christmas Child area team meeting last week and prayerfully set our goal for our area for 2015.

We decided to set our goal based only on the boxes for Erie, Crawford, and Warren counties--the three counties that comprise the geographic area for our team.  Because of that our goal will be lower than the goal we prayed for last year.

There was a good spirit of unity at the meeting as the eight team members there moved to trust God for 45,000 boxes in 2015 (our area collected 41,210 in 2014.)

We don't know how God will bring in those additional 3,790 boxes but we are praying for them and asking God to rope them in.

ps--I have a prayer request that seems kind of ridiculous but is important to me.  I'll be leaving at 7:00 am on Friday morning to drive to Maryland (about a 7 hour drive) for a retreat with our OCC area coordinators from my region.  I'm not a very brave driver and the weather here in our area of Pennsylvania is unpredictable.  Would you pray for safe travels for all of us as we travel to this retreat and, even more important, that God will have His way in all of us there? Thanks, everyone.