Spring Training

This morning our pastor talked about the importance of spiritual training. My favorite point was that in addition to equipping ourselves through studying the Bible and imitating the disciplines of Jesus, we grow when God puts us in "need to know and need to grow" situations.

I immediately thought of Operation Christmas Child and how this ministry of packing gift-filled shoeboxes for children around the world has become an amazing spiritual training ground for me and so many others. Through Operation Christmas Child we've taken risks and asked God for things that are impossible without Him showing up, and in the midst of that all of us have learned His love and faithfulness in new ways.

It happened again this week. I calculated that we have 19 weeks until our community-wide Operation Christmas Child packing party and that we need an average of 605 stuffed animals each week to reach our gaol by September 24th. So this week I and my team and others were praying for 600 stuffed animals. This was a huge challenge, especially when I realized I had to teach a class for our local hospital on Saturday morning and would miss prime-time yard sales.

But today, by God's grace, the official weekly total stands at 554 and since I know two other area team members got 'about 30' each I'd say we're beyond the goal. And how did God do it this week?

Well, on Wednesday at our Area Team meeting Elizabeth brought in 56 that had been donated and on Friday one of the teachers at my school brought in 63 from her children. On Friday evening I went to the local church that was hosting a huge rummage sale and asked for permission to shop early because I couldn't be there on Saturday morning. They allowed me to choose a bag of 89 animals and set them aside to pay for on Saturday.

I hit all the yard sales I could on Saturday afternoon and found that when I talked to people about Operation Christmas Child in many cases one of my team members had already been to their home and picked up animals. They must be well trained.

And now the animals are crossing state lines to get here. On Saturday night my friend Judy brought me animals she'd bought at a yard sale in Cincinnati that morning. On Sunday I got a special package that was delivered to my church. It was sent from Cheryl Lawrence in Indiana who reads this blog and was moved to shop for animals and mail them to me.

Getting that package from someone I've never met was like a special hug from God. My OCC Regional Director, Leigh Fisher, had prayed with me on the phone on Monday that God would send me new animals and that's just what Cheryl sent. Cheryl, you encouraged me in unknown ways.

I went through the Operation Christmas Child Area Team training with three new team members in the past few weeks--each of them an answer to prayer. God is training us through these blessings.

And God is training us in the mundane pressures of the day. My husband and daughter are hopefully in Haiti right now working to build two houses this week. They were scheduled to arrive there on Saturday but fog kept their plane circling JFK until they missed their connecting flight. This delay made them arrive in Haiti a full day late. And this trip was already delayed for months when their supply containers could not pass through customs at the port in Haiti. More training.

Today I tried to visit a team member who is with her sick father at the hospital but after struggling to find a parking area I couldn't figure out how to get into the facility. Disgusted, I came home to find my neighbor sweeping up glass from my front step. He did a good deed and mowed our front lawn only to have the glass in the front storm door explode just as he finished. More training.

And so, we praise God for the blessings and we keep praying for 600 more animals to come into the ark this coming week from any state in the union.

But they'd better be trained.

NPR and Mother's Day

Here are my three daughters, Amy (33), Jen (31) and Julie (29) with my Mom on her 97th birthday last July. I think of the years that span their lives and at myself strung in the middle and marvel at how God made us a family. This week Amy, who works at National Public Radio, did a phone interview with me about my favorite song. She said they were thinking of doing something on-air with this and I was concerned about coming up with an answer that was NPRish enough. I didn't think "I Stuck My Head In A Little Skunk's Hole" (one of our family camp song favorites) would make the cut.

Honestly, my favorite song changes from week to week. I did tell Amy that one of my current favorites is "Our God" my Chris Tomlin, but I also told her that the "Hallelujah Chorus" has been a lifetime favorite, too. It was the recessional for our wedding and I'm especially fond of the YouTube flash mob versions. Breaking into a few bars of it has always been my reaction to jubilation over anything from finding a lost item to arriving at the last day of school.

A text copy of some of our banter ended up on the NPR website and you can see it (the second piece down) by clicking HERE

I was comforted as I read through the posts on the website of the other moms' favorite songs. Many of them were not far off from my favorites. When Amy was a baby we used to sing "Once In Love With Amy" to her, much like Robin's mother sang "When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin Along" to her as a baby. I remember rocking Amy at night and singing Helen Reddy's "You And Me Against The World", too.

There were so many musical stages we passed through as a family--Sesame Street songs to Kids Praise with Psalty the Singing Songbook to Amy Grant and Sandi Patty (sorry, Sandi if I misspelled your name--I never could remember which had the 'i' and which had the 'y'). Then there was the broadway musical stage, the Simon and Garfunkel stage, and then my kids kind of passed me by and left me in the dust on the way to the alternative rock and classic rock stage.

The songs that are part of our lives--rollicking renditions of Bill Gaither's "I Am A Promise" or even "Jesus Loves Me" are not all timeless classics but they frame moments of beauty and being. Some of those tuneless things we hum just to survive the day are totally our own creations never to be repeated.

Music and motherhood go together and I'm thanking God for both of them today.

A Legacy for OCC

In celebration of Mother's Day I want to pay tribute to my Mom, Mabel Tarr, and the legacy of her continuing love that has enabled me to follow God on this Operation Christmas Child journey. My Mom is 97.75 years old. She was born on July 13, 1913 and deserves to count every month of her amazing life.

Mom has seen a lot of changes over nearly ten decades of life and much of that life has not been easy. I believe there were 10 children in her family (only 3 now survive)and because her parents couldn't afford to care for all of them, my mother, in her preteen years, was given to her aunt and uncle to raise. They provided for her materially but she worked hard for them in return.

Mom's biggest 'claim to fame' is that she attended school with Lucille Ball and even acted in plays with her at the Jamestown Little Theater. Our family calls the following picture of Mom her 'Lucille Ball picture' because we think there's a resemblance there.

When Mom was about 35 she and her first husband packed up their four kids (ages 4-12, I think) and left their family in Jamestown, NY to move to Erie, PA. On the night they moved into their new home, my mother's husband died in his sleep. She was left with four children, no family nearby, and no job. She couldn't even drive a car. But she trusted God to get her through, and He, of course, did.

She remarried (to a widower 15 years her senior) a few years later and I was born a year after that. Eighteen months later my younger sister, Patti, was born but she had an undetected congenital heart defect and died at 10 weeks.

Mom learned early and well to move past grief and get on with life. Even at 97 (okay, 97.75) she looks ahead to what's next. She's a two-time cancer survivor (cervical cancer 29 years ago and a 5 hr. surgery for colon cancer at age 95). She does two crossword puzzles every day, does her own laundry, still lives at home with my sister, and knitted many of her Christmas presents last year. She is a staunch supporter of Operation Christmas Child--both financially and with her help in bagging soap and candy.

My Mom taught me and my four siblings a few things over the years that helped shape our lives:

1) If someone needs help and you're in a position to give it, then GIVE. We used to tease my Mom that we were going to put on her grave marker, "Well done good and faithful sucker" because she could never say 'no' to anyone. But I now value the legacy that taught us to be open-handed.

2) If you make a commitment or a promise, keep it. Mom's work ethic is amazing. She has often stayed up all night to finish a sewing project or make favors or bake for a bake sale. Her life has been so full that she's often worked to the last minute but she WILL DO what she promises. One of her trademark sayings is, "Never do today what you can put off 'til tomorrow, 'cause you might die tonight and you won't have to do it." That's just her legacy of humor, though, and that's a story for another time.

3) If you're going to do it, do it well. Mom passed on a legacy of excellence. She is an expert seamstress, having taught herself to sew when her oldest daughter was a baby. Her first project was to make a coat for her daughter out of one of her husband's old costs. Pretty ambitious--and that is classic Mom. She's an accomplished cook who made lavish holiday meals for our large blended family, worked full-time into her 70s at a shoe store, and volunteered as Den Mother, Girl Scout Leader, PTA President, and took the lead in several Masonic organizations. And she did it all well.

Consequently, our family works hard at what they do. My oldest sister became the Supreme Worthy High Priestess (like the international president--don't ask) of a Masonic organization for women and spent an entire year driving around the country with my mother. They gave up their home and lived in hotels, traveling to every state of the union--my sister was 60 and my mother was 82 at the time.

My oldest brother ran 31 marathons and is still working now at age 74. My next oldest brother has bowled a 300 game and is an accomplished golfer. My third brother is a Baptist pastor who works tirelessly in his small congregation and is one of the most humble (and greatest) persons I know. He spends every Saturday morning at an adolscent treatment facility talking with troubled kids and showing them the love of Jesus.

Without Mom's legacy of giving, commitment, and excellence I don't know if I'd be packing Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes as I now do. And without this involvement in Operation Christmas Child I would have missed the greatest journey of my life.

Thank You, God, for giving me this blessing: Mom.

Celebration & The Biggest Loser

What a great Operation Christmas Child Celebrarion Meeting we had on Tuesday, April 26th here in Erie, PA. We were blessed that Grace Church allowed us to use a meeting room in their comfortable facility and Leigh Fisher, our OCC Regional Director came from Baltimore to be with us and even treated our team to dinner from Chick-fil-A before the meeting.

There were 24 of us at the meeting--a definite answer to prayer--and I think the best part was hearing firsthand from two members of the Grace Church mission team who were able to distribute Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes in Haiti. Pam and Brenda shared from their heart about how much these boxes meant to the children who received them and Pam crafted an amazing video of the shoebox distribution. The greatest celebration of all came at that distibution when 14 children responded to the gospel message and came forward to pray to receive Christ. All of heaven was rejoicing that day and you can't ask for a better celebration than that.

I'm also celebrating another blessing that happened back on April 15th. That was the day that our Biggest Loser competition ended at work and I was declared The Biggest Loser (no surpise--I've known that for a while). In this case, though, it was an official title I earned by losing the highest percentage of weight over 10 weeks. I let all the other 'contestants' know that the prize money was being used to pay for the 1000 water bottles I ordered for shoeboxes a few weeks before from a tip I got on the Operation Christmas Child Extranet website. The water bottles were only about 20 cents each but to have the bill for them paid just by NOT eating was a real cause for celebration.

This week I found white cotton 'bucket hats' on the Oriental Trading Company website and was able to get them for about 17 cents each. Another cause for celebration.

If you want to be blessed in another way to hear about how God is working right now (even with a guitar with 5 strings) at shoebox distributions in Panama, check out Matthew West's blog at www.matthewwest.com

Honestly, seeing God provide for all our needs is the biggest reason to celebrate every day of the year

Waiting For God

Two years ago one of my first blog posts featured this picture and it was titled "Waiting". The post was about my trip to help distribute Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes in the Dominican Republic and how the idea of 'waiting' seemed to be the theme of that trip for me. Two years later I am still driven by the fact that so many children are waiting to hear of God's love through a simple shoebox.

But on this day between Good Friday and Easter morning, I'm thinking of another kind of waiting. Waiting for God. Can you imagine how the disciples must have felt on that 'day between'? They thought of all Jesus' talk of resurrection but all they could remember was the sight of Him on the cross (or at least the thought of it since most of them deserted Him there). Where was their hope? What were they thinking as they waited?

In my high school French class we read (in French, of course) Samuel Beckett's play "Waiting For Godot"--an Existentialist's classic about two men waiting for Godot (God) who never shows up. Our God, though, is not a god who doesn't show up. Our God is a God who is HERE--always.

So often it seems like I'm waiting for Him to show up with what I need--stuffed animals and pencils and crayons and volunteers and a myriad of other things I feel I need to get to the goal of packing thousands of Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes. But the fact is still true that in the midst of my waiting He is always HERE. And He is also with every child who waits to receive a shoebox and hear of His love.

On this 'day between', God, I thank You that You, our omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent God, are always HERE.

Dollars In General

The amazing thing about Operation Christmas Child is that as simple as the program seems (get a shoebox and fill it with gifts) it's a journey of life change that can only be completed through God's power. Gifts are packed and transported and inspected and shipped, receiving countries arrange for transportation and make plans for distributions, and discipleship training programs are instituted and completed. But in the midst of all of that activity, if God doesn't bring life change the project won't have any eternal impact. That fact is overwhelming and freeing all at the same time.

And over the years I've found that even the simple things about this act of packing shoeboxes can be complex. As the goals increase year by year--local, regional, national goals--and as we look at the billions of children who are still waiting to know they are loved by God, it's clear that we're all in over our heads here. If God doesn't come through for us, this project won't happen.

Today my church received a grant from a local community foundation that they will use to buy a trailer to haul equipment for local community service projects in our city. That amount of money would be enough to pay for packing 15,000 shoeboxes and I had a moment when I thought, "Why can't I get a grant like that?" Then I realized that I DO get a grant every year from God Himself. Since I have access to unlimited resources from the God of the universe who owns all things, I can certainly get along without a local grant.

And today was another example of God's provision. I went to 6 Dollar General stores today and found 287 clothing items--hats, gloves, and scarves--for 25 cents each that will be great for shoeboxes. I already have over 14,000 pieces of clothing and that amazes me. I know God has a plan for all the stuffed animals and crayons and pens and paper and soap and pencils we need, too. Oh, yeah, those pencils I ordered last week arrived today. And a few other people got their box of 1008 pencils also. God's provision is never too good to be true.

Yesterday I watched the movie "Facing The Giants" again and cried again as I reminded myself that NOTHING is impossible with God. It's okay that our Operation Christmas Child project is utterly dependent on God because He is utterly dependable.

Whether it's dollars or stuffed animals or team members--in general God will keep His promise to provide. As Leigh Fisher told me today, "We just have to keep praying as we crawl across the field...nothing is impossible with God. NOTHING!! "

Too Good To Be True

I'm always looking for good deals for items to fill our Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes. In fact, the only way we can hope to get enough items to fill 15,000 boxes is by trusting God to provide us with deals that are "too good to be true".

I found another one of those this week when www.dollardays.com --an online wholesale website where I've often bought such items as soap and toothbrushes--had a deal for free shipping on school supplies and also had a coupon code for $20 off. I was able to buy 1000 mini pencils with erasers for only 16 cents! And, using Facebook, I was able to have several others order some for our boxes too. Now, this MAY be too good to be true, since we haven't received the pencils yet but my order's been processed and my 16 cent payment made. This is just another example of God's great provision. I can't wait to see what He'll do to bring in all the other items we need.

We have an Operation Christmas Child Area Team meeting at my home tonight and I've been thinking that the impact God has allowed our team to make around the world is also almost too good to be true. Along with supporting a number of Christian ministries, I also believe it's important to support non-profit organizations to better my community. So I give to the United Way and to other non-profits that work in our area. It takes a lot of resources for these organizations to make a difference.

Then I think about our little Operation Christmas Child team. By God's grace we worked together with NO operating budget and NO paid employees to make a difference in the lives of 27,444 children in 2010 (not to mention the difference those boxes may have made in their families and their communities.) For 2011 we are prayerfully asking God to allow us to collect 32011 boxes to make a difference for even more. Only in God's economy is this possible.

At the OCC Connect Conference we learned about the 12-lesson discipleship course offered to children after they receive their shoeboxes called The Greatest Journey. By the end of this course each child is taught how to share the gospel and encouraged to choose 9 persons to pray for and share with. Can you imagine how this ministry THROUGH these well-trained children can multiply?

God, we stand amazed. What You do through Operation Christmas Child is, quite simply, too good to be true.

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