Our Eyes Are On You

Yes--I have been out of the blogging world for a season. No--we have not canceled our Operation Christmas Child packing party for 2020.

Despite COVID-19 and the disappearance of normal life God has continued to bless us with amazing donations of items. When I last wrote on March 18th we'd just received a huge donation of filler items.

Then, just a week and a half later, we welcomed this 15' long vehicle full of donations from a fellow Operation Christmas Child shoebox packer in the Allentown, PA area. He'd had these bags in his warehouse for many years and never got them sorted. So he decided to bring them to us.

The thing is, we weren't able to assemble as a team during those early weeks of the pandemic. A couple other teams members and I took turns taking home multiple bags--many of them falling apart--and sorting the contents. That sorting took a full three months to complete, and we had to discard a number of items. But in the end we salvaged more than 10,000 usable items that will bless children.

On the 3rd Wednesdays in May and June we held a modified packing party work day. Not the public one we'd normally enjoy but one just for 10 team members with social distancing and masks.

God had us prepared for this before we even knew it was coming. We'd already decided to make only about 6,000 jump ropes this year and one couple on our team--Myron and Patti--completed all of those singlehandedly. Pam had already determined she wanted to pack all the school packs herself in her home so we didn't have that task to complete.

The lack of church rummage sales and garage sales is no problem this year because Ellen has been driving to other states to pick up beanie babies she's been purchasing on Facebook marketplace. We're just a few hundred shy of having enough for 22,000 boxes and it's only June!

In the middle of this the warehouse where the bulk of our items were stored was sold and we were given two months to move all those pallets of treasures. God answered prayer and provided another option for us.

We believe God's blessed us with enough items to pack 22,000 boxes to bless 22,000 children BUT we have no idea how they are going to get packed. How many people will we be able to have at our packing party at one time in September? How can we pack more efficiently or start earlier to accomplish the goal?

We considered doing a modified packing party to pack one truck full in August, then two trucks in September, then one more truck in October but the church where we hold the packing party wasn't able to give us the space for those extra days. 

I thought about approaching other churches to see if we could find somewhere else to pack in August and/or October but several team members did not want to do that.

So...now we wait. Actually, I've been sleeping better than usual and have the peace of knowing there's not really anything I can do right now. We have no way of knowing how to make plans at this point.

But we continue to reassure ourselves that God would not have given us all these unprecedented donations and supplied all our needs in advance of this pandemic if He did not want 22,000 children to be blessed with filled shoeboxes.  We have no plan, but He does. That we know.

We echo the prayer of Jehoshaphat when he faced battle against a huge enemy army, "We do not know what to do but our eyes are on you."