Catching Up

 

Writing. I haven't done it for some time. At least not on this blog. And tomorrow begins our official packing for 2022, so I thought I should catch up a bit on all the ways Jehovah Jireh has answered our prayers over the past three months or so.

First, the facility at Grace Church where we hosted our community-wide packing party since 2009 is constructing a video production studio in the area we used to use for packing boxes. By God's grace, at the end of April we were able to secure a new venue at First Alliance Church. This provides a larger space for us and the church was so accommodating in clearing their calendar for us to use their large gym. Unfortunately, it's not air conditioned so we're praying for cooler weather this coming week.

Then, on May 2nd, we received a truckload of items for our boxes. As always, we prayed hard about all the details of this delivery. This was the culmination of five months of steps orchestrated by our merciful God and brought us 19,000+ baseball hats, over 1,500 pairs of children's character slippers, and 6 pallets of miscellaneous fillers. Those pallets of fillers were a gamble but God provided over 2,000 stuffed animals as well as many fun toys on them. 

At the beginning of June God blessed us with the opportunity to buy more than 12,000 more pairs of children's slippers. That's more than we need for this year, but we didn't want to pass up the opportunity. We weren't sure how to get them shipped but ultimately Logistics Plus, a local shipping company, arranged the shipping for us at their cost and that saved us money in this crazy economy with gas prices soaring. 

We also weren't sure where we could store this latest truckload of slippers. Thank You, Lord, for providing the Danowskis to offer us space in their newly rented warehouse. I was out of town with our ministry coordinators at Operation Christmas Child recruitment training when the truck arrived on 6/18/22 but there were enough volunteers to get the job done and God even provided a man with a fork lift to unload the truck. A couple weeks later we needed to move the 9 pallets of large plush bunnies from that warehouse. I didn't know where we would put them so I put out a plea on Facebook and God provided what we needed! 

We were still praying for about 7,000-8,000 more stuffed animals for this year. God did "exceedingly, abundantly beyond", though, and Ellen found a contact to buy 27,000 from a man in Ohio who was selling the Beanie Baby collection amassed by his 90-year-old father who died this past May. Going to pick them up was quite an adventure, but God worked out the details. Four team members helped finance the $10,000 cash purchase plus another $1000 to pay for renting a truck to transport them. Now we have more than we need for this year and will have to move them again to another storage spot once this year's packing is done. It seems God is preparing us for 2023 packing already. 

And here we are just a few weeks later getting ready to start this year's packing. Two days ago we received our shipment of cartons and boxes to get ready for attempting to pack 11,200 boxes to fill two trucks. We prayed much over the delivery and God blessed us as the truck driver used his pallet jack to pull the pallets into the gym for us.  Later that day we took a borrowed truck to pick up stuffed animals from storage. 

Yesterday we had to load and unload two large trucks full of items from our main storage container and another team member's basement. God provided the trucks, the volunteers, and a DRY (though hot!) day for the job. By 3:00 yesterday afternoon we had the gym set up and ready to pack--the earliest we've done this for the past three years. 

Today we're enjoying a sabbath and praising God for a busy three months that brought us to the brink of another packing adventure. Tomorrow we start and trust God to do it AGAIN!