Marathon Monday

Doing a nightly blog the week of the Operation Christmas Child packing party is a way to help me remember what we did when next year rolls around.

God answered many prayers today.  We got the call last Friday from the trucking company, and they said they'd deliver our boxes on Tuesday.  I told them I really, really needed them on Monday and they consented to deliver on Monday as long as we could accommodate a tractor trailer.

I prayed all weekend for an early delivery and, praise God, I got the call at 7:30 am this morning that the driver expected to be at the church by 9:15 - 9:20.  Well...he was later than that.  Then when he got the truck into position he couldn't get the lift gate to work.  I put out a call for prayer and after an hour of waiting for him to try to get it to work he called for help. The terminal told him there were only two choices--he could return the load to the terminal or we could offload it by hand--all 305 cartons of boxes and 90 cartons.  We decided to try the hand offload so the driver pulled the truck around to the back gym door.  One of our guys then noticed a sign that explained a key to operating the lift gate and guess what? They got it to work. Answered prayer. So they moved the truck around to the other side of the church again and moved the pallets with our rented pallet jack.

Meanwhile I had a minor panic attack when I realized we only had 90 cartons in which to pack 30,000 plus boxes.  Tried to call my regional manager with no answer so I ended up calling the number from OCC Charlotte that was on the bill of lading and got the word that the remainder of the cartons are on another shipment. Whew! Just trying to keep us on our toes.

Because we didn't know when the boxes would arrive we'd not announced this publicly as a work day so there were only a few team members and a couple of people we could recruit quickly to fold boxes. Still, we worked hard until 5:00 pm and got 912 boxes folded today.

Unfortunately I wore out my right hand and had to switch to just labeling so I could use my left one. I'm dosing up with Ibuprofen and Biofreeze and hoping it heals up some before tomorrow.

I just got back last night from a few days in Chicago for my daughter's baby shower so I missed my normal stuffed animal pick-up at church yesterday. Today I filled my van with bags that had been left there.

After I got home at 6:00 this evening I began the stuffed animal sorting, washing, and bagging process and just finished at 11:40.  It took me that long to sort out over 1,000 animals!  I don't have the exact number, but we must need fewer than 4,000 now.  I still have a partial load to wash but I figure I might as well wait.  Someone is sure to drop off more that need a bath in the next few days.

Man, it's already Tuesday! Onward...