God Showed Up

I never doubted God would show up for this Operation Christmas Child packing party, but our God of immeasurably more did more than I could ask or imagine.

I know so many were praying for us and that gave me peace.  I honestly believe this 7th packing party may have been the best yet.

We started the morning by making the 7th lap of our Jericho march, praying as we walked around the church.  It was great to have Jeff Berger, Operation Christmas Child Regional Manager and also Dawn Ward and Arden Reed from Samaritan's Purse with us.  I sensed then that God was once again hearing and answering.

God gave me grace as I shared my simple testimony in the opening, and I'm praying He'll use that in someone's life.

We started the day with 5,681 boxes already packed and even though we started out a bit slowly we made a few adjustments that got the line moving more quickly.  We ended up adding two more lines to have a total of six lines of folks going through to fill the boxes.  That really got things moving and we hit a new record with 1,150 boxes packed in just fifteen minutes.  Crazy.

We'd prayed much about how to combine the items God had provided for us and He seemed to lead us step by step as we went through the day.

Before 4:00 we used up every box we'd been sent, even taping up the few that had been damaged along the way.  We also used two dozen we had left from last year.  There were so many items left, and I knew we could pack many more boxes.  We made a contact to see if we could use regular GO boxes to pack, but by the time we got permission to do that we'd already lost momentum.  I looked around at all the clean up to be done, talked with my team, and made the decision to stop packing.

And the grand total...25,625 boxes...that's almost three thousand more than we packed in 2014.
We packed up so many leftovers--1800 large plastic travel tumblers, cartons of baseball hats and visors, all the basic items except soap, and many fillers.  If we'd had boxes and energy we could have packed hundreds more.

Just as we began cleaning up, the rain began to fall in torrents.  We all got wet as we trundled hand truck loads into the storage container and tossed all those items in on top of the soggy-still-drying boxes of jump rope handles.

The container is a hot mess but, like Scarlett O'Hara, I'll think about that tomorrow...

Or maybe later.

Meanwhile, I'm just going to enjoy a good night's sleep while visions of a beautiful day dance in my head.