Making Space

 

Does anyone else feel like life involves constantly making space? In a spiritual sense I've been struggling lately to move out sinful attitudes and bitterness to make space to love others and abide in Jesus. It's a never-ending battle I've been fighting all my life. Even with the Holy Spirit working in me I can never seem to make space the way I should. I'm so glad Paul wrote in Romans 7:15 "For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate." It gives me hope to hear him say he struggled too.

And in a packing party sense we were making space today in our storage container. We know we have to use every square centimeter of that space as wisely as possible so today five of us worked to get the things we know we won't need until later to the back end of the container and the things we may need sooner to the front. After two hours it looks so much better, we have a schematic in hand to remind us of what is where, and I feel relief. 

Back in the days when we did one large packing party and unloaded the container all at the same time it didn't make so much difference. Now, though, we're pretty sure we're doing a week of packing in August and another week in September so we don't want to have to unload it all and repack it. The fact that our storage is miles away from our anticipated packing venue makes it even trickier. 

Speaking of venue, we finally got our shipping window dates so we can begin to make plans. It doesn't help that we got those right before Easter when it's tough to make any connections with church staff, but we had a team meeting yesterday and made some decisions so today I'm going to craft emails and try to get some meetings set up. 

The main reason we had to get that storage unit ready for service is that God gave us favor and allowed us to make that large order of tens of thousands of shoebox items (probably 36 pallets of them) at great prices. We're not home yet. We still need to pray in another 10,000 stuffed animals and some other fillers but we have many of the basic items. It's possible we could fill four trucks IF we get a venue and can recruit enough volunteers to pack. 

Meanwhile, I'm still praying God will help me make space to store what I need to store and clean out what I need to clean out--both physically and spiritually. Neverending effort for sure.