It's Urgent but He's Enough

I just finished an Operation Christmas Child learning module about "Leading With Urgency". The thing about serving the Lord is that you can never do enough. There are always more to be reached--2 billion children in the world under age 15, for example.

Yet, on the other hand, when we're yoked with Christ He is enough. The balance is to prayerfully ask Him what He wants me and our OCC team to do each day, each month, each year.

So as I listened to this teaching with its exhortation to be flexible, continuously seek improvement, and be entrepreneurial I was doing some self-evaluation. Our team spends a lot of time planning, praying and executing by God's grace a major community-wide packing party. And...to be honest...I spend a lot of time wondering if that's what God really wants us to do. I mean, it's not at all part of the high-impact OCC process.

Still, as I look at the gifts and passions of our team members I see how they love to pack shoeboxes. From the time I was a young child I loved to hunt for bargains, and while this is not a spiritual gift (unless you loosely group it in the category of 'helps') it's both a skill and a passion of mine and of a number of our team members.

I feel God has gifted us with skills and resources to do this annual packing party and it's by His grace and good pleasure that it's grown year by year.

This year we are practicing flexibility as we just got the official word this week that we'll be packing the newer larger corrugated boxes this year. With 25% more space to fill we're praying again over our goal. We did get permission from the church that allows us to use their facilities for the packing party to put five trucks in their parking lot instead of the four we've had for the past few years. With five trucks and putting 16 boxes in each carton (as opposed to the 23 we've been able to put in each carton previously) we figure we could do 27,000 boxes.  But...can we adequately fill that many?

Meanwhile we had our second packing party work day this week. We had 20+ volunteers throughout the day and assembled nearly 2,000 jump ropes (only 23,600 more to go!) and a LOT of school packs. AND a couple came who said they want to investigate serving as year-round volunteers!

Last Saturday we hosted a display table (pictured above) at our local Christian radio station's Women's Conference and made some good connections. Six new prayer partners committed to pray for OCC.

We're praying and investigating item options for this year's boxes.  We're going to ask God to help us be flexible, continuously improving, and entrepreneurial. We're asking God to show us what His will is for our team's packing party in 2019.

Because, in the end, God knows the true urgency of His mission and when He gave that mission He also gave the best promise ever, "I am with you always."

And THAT is enough!