Goal Guidance

If nothing else this Operation Christmas Child journey keeps me on my knees and in dependence on God because nothing happens without Him.

So here I am again praying and waiting for guidance. After weeks of waiting for the shipping window dates from Operation Christmas Child headquarters we received that information almost two weeks ago. I immediately sent emails to the church that allows us to use their facility for our packing party to see if our desired dates in September are available. Now...we wait for the church to get back to us. Last year that took six weeks. We have a deadline of May 6th to let OCC know our date and the number of boxes we plan as our goal.

We have three weeks to get those answers.

We've been praying also about our goal for the packing party. We know we'll be getting larger boxes and will need more items to fill them and more truck space since each carton will only hold 16 boxes this year instead of 23 boxes.

Today I had a phone call with my regional director and he gave me the rating for our box quality from last year's packing party. The boxes from our 2017 party earned an "A" rating but the four boxes they pulled as samples from the 30,590 boxes we did in 2018 all needed more filler items added so we received a "C" rating this year.  I was disappointed because I honestly thought our boxes were better in 2018 than in previous years.

In our last meeting we studied the sovereignty of God. God knew which boxes would be picked to be rated from our 2018 packing party.  Maybe this "C" rating is an answer to our prayers and He is telling us to cut back further than we thought we would.

Should we do only 22,000 boxes this year instead of the 27,000 we'd been recently planning?  We do have an inspection process at the end of the line but obviously it wasn't good enough--at least for four of those boxes.

We believe God's arm is NOT too short and He can do anything. The question is: how many boxes does He want us to pack?

Please pray with us for His answers over the next 21 days as we look together for His goal guidance.