Ark Advances

I can't believe that two weeks from now our packing party will be history. Last night I couldn't go to sleep again--both excited and thinking of details. All the animals for the ark are still resting in the bedrooms--all 47 bags of them--so at 2:30 am I decided to sort them out to see how many animals we had for boys and how many for girls.

I hauled all the bags off the beds and put the ones for boys--all 29 of them-- in the living room and then counted the 12 for girls and the 6 for 2-4 year olds.

I got them all added to the previous total and we have.....14,400 including the ones already in the ark. There are 1,000 stored in the home of another team member, bringing our grand total to 15,400. I still have about another 100 in the process of being washed and/or drying so that means I just need another 500 to get to 16,000 and be sure to have enough.

Today brought another chore. I bought 2,000 pencils that don't have erasers because they were the cheapest I could find at a wholesale company. I had hundreds of pencil top erasers so today I counted the erasers out by hundreds and put them on the pencils.

Here's what I can't figure out--my shipping order of pencils included 14 boxes that were marked to hold one gross each. The total should have been 2,016. But I counted out 1,900 pencils and put erasers on them and I still have 3 and 1/2 boxes of a gross each left. I've counted several times and I can't figure out why I have so many left over.

I guess God is starting the multiplication process early.

What Joy!

Yesterday evening I was exhausted at 6:00 and couldn't wait for an acceptable time to fall into bed. Then a few hours later I was lying in bed at midnight wide awake thinking about our upcoming Operation Christmas Child packing party.

Instead of my usual nighttime thoughts of dread and fear and obsessing over details, though, I was filled with such amazing excitement. And I woke up in that same excitement this morning. I'm not sure if this is the result of someone's prayers or just God's abundant grace (not that HIs grace could ever be 'just' anything). I feel like I've been given a gift to see His goodness in a new way and I want to hang onto this sense of wonder.

I think back to 2005 when the small OCC team at my former church tried to have a packing party. We sent notices to surrounding churches and we planned and prepared for weeks.. When the day came only about 15 people showed up. We packed around 600 boxes that day, mostly through the work of the few people on the team. If you'd told any of us that one day we'd be planning to pack 15,000 boxes in one day I don't think one of us would have believed it.

Just 4 years ago in 2007 a small team of us worked all year--packing around 100 or 200 boxes at a time--to pack 4,665 boxes. Again, if you'd told us that in just 4 years we'd be planning to pack 15,000 in one day we'd have been incredulous.

As we approach this packing party I am struck by what a miracle this is. This is happening not because of the strength or wisdom of man but because God can do anything and He's graciously chosen to allow us to be a part of what He's doing.

I know that soon I'll be thinking about the details again and wondering how it's all going to work out. But I want to delay that as long as I can. I want to just bask in the wonder of all He's done and all He has planned to bless thousands of children and adults around the world.

It's simple: this is God's work and He will accomplish it.

I want to ponder these things in my heart.

Storage Saga

Wow! Look at this nice empty storage area. Uhhh, that is NOT what our storage container looks like right now. Ours is nearing maximum capacity and when the 30 cases of soap (15,000 bars) get delivered tomorrow morning it may just max out.

Over my years of packing Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes, storage has always been an issue. I think I have a soft spot in my heart for that much-maligned guy in the Bible who kept tearing down his barns to build bigger ones. I can see his problem.

Although my hoarding is seasonal, it's still a problem. Back in the middle of the last decade when we had a weekend of packing boxes at my old church it would take 5 team members coming to my house with their cars to unload the stuff from my attic. But that was when we packed about 700 boxes.

The stuff for 15,000 (give or take a few hundred--HOPEFULLY give) makes for a lot of storage space.

I just counted, and I now have 42 garbage bags full of stuffed animals on the spare beds in my home. And I'm still praying for another 12 or 15 bags full over the next week and a half.

So if you live in Erie and have stuffed animals to donate, bring them in ASAP so we can sort and clean them.....but if you have other items to donate, if you can possibly keep them in your home until Sunday, September 18th, I would be so grateful. If you can't, bring them in and we'll find a spot for them somewhere. There's always my bathtub!

And speaking of September 18th, if you go to Grace McKean we could sure use your help to unload the storage container right after the 9:15 worship service is over. With enough help we can get it done quickly.

And then we'll have plenty of room to start filling it up again.

Testing, Stressing, and Resting

I can't believe I haven't done a blog post for almost two weeks and I don't even know where all that time went. Well, actually I know where a lot of it went--school and getting ready for school.

Operation Christmas Child packing party preparations have been taking a back seat to the launch of a new school year. As a school nurse for three elementary schools (one of them new to me this year) I've been facing most days of the past two weeks asking myself, "Where do I begin today?" The new year brings chaos and stress.

By the time I finished my first week on Friday I had a headache that lasted until this morning. And I almost never get headaches.

Which brings me to my wondering about the tests in life and how to move from stressing to resting in the Lord. I've been feeling like my mind is on overdrive with a constant revving. My mind jumps from detail to detail. I can read my facebook statuses from a year ago and find they read the same.

I need to keep reminding myself that God is in control. He always shows up and makes these major packing parties work for His glory. On Wednesday this week I got a neat gift in the mail from my regional Operation Christmas Child office. It's a cool little box filled with slips of paper--each one containing a Bible verse--one for every day between now and the end of Operation Christmas Child's National Collection Week on November 21st. What a perfect gift to get this week! I confess I've been cheating a bit and reading more than the allotted verse per day.

And in the middle of this busy school week there were still packing party preparations. God brought in another 765 stuffed animals this week to be sorted and bagged. I think we're only about 1200 away from the goal now. The idea of God bringing in 15,000 stuffed animals this year is astounding.

I ordered 15,000 bars of soap this week, too.

Thursday evening brought the final meeting of our packing party team and the first where we were all together. It feels like there are a lot of details still up in the air but I know I need to trust God with them.

Three weeks from today it will all be over and the truck should be ready to ship out.

I know there will be a lot of tests in these next weeks and I'm praying God will move me from the stressing to the resting.

What's In Our Container?

I spent 3 hours today in an inservice to learn how to use PowerPoint in an updated application I don't have access to--either at home or at school. But I also learned about a fun website (www.wordle.net) where you can make fun montages out of words. You can view the result of today's education by clicking here.

These are the items in our Operation Christmas Child storage container right now waiting to be packed into shoeboxes at our September 24th packing party. Well, that's not precisely correct because not ALL of these items are in the container yet.

For example, even though we hauled 14 garbage bags (each full of 100 stuffed animals) to the storage container last night, there are still 27 more bags full occupying beds and floors in our bedrooms. And I'm praying God will provide another 24 or 25 bags full in the next month.

Yesterday I was blessed to take a road trip to the beautiful Kinzua Dam area here in Western Pennsylvania. I went to meet and have lunch with Patti Seth, our collection center coordinator from Warren, PA.

And my dear friend Ellen Bunnell made the two-hour round trip from Bradford to bring the Bradford Zoo--a collection of nearly 300 stuffed animals collected by the children at the Hill Memorial UM Church's VBS this year. With such great donations it's no wonder God has filled The Ark nearly to capacity.

Well, I guess the animals won't mind sleeping on our beds for the next few weeks.

GO Boxes

Look at this stack of beautiful boxes ready to be filled with gifts for needy children around the world through Operation Christmas Child. These boxes have recently been renamed GO boxes and that stands for Gospel Opportunity--that's what each of these simple boxes really is for the child who receives it.

Last night my sweet OCC Area Team member Terri Mouyard and I met at Grace Church to assemble these boxes. We hadn't really done this for 9 months and it took a few minutes to get our groove but then we started folding like the crazed OCC fanatics we are. Within 2 hours we'd assembled 200 boxes--ready to be taken by church members to be filled.

Then this morning Dianne Oschmann, our Relay Center Coordinator from Seneca, PA, drove up to Erie to pick up 7 cartons of these GO Boxes for her area. She insists that everyone who takes boxes makes sure each one is filled or returned to her and she's seeing phenomenal growth in Operation Christmas Child in her area through these boxes.

Each Area Coordinator receives a limited number of these and as they start to become more popular at churches here in Northwestern PA I'm afraid we won't be able to meet the demand.

The good news, though, is that these boxes are now available for purchase on the Samaritan's Purse website. You can order a carton of 100 boxes for $24.00 plus shipping which varies by zip code. To get them here in Erie the cost for shipping is $13.37 which I think is a great deal. You can order a minimum of 100 boxes or a maximum of 1,000 on the website. For orders over 1,000 you'll need to call to make arrangements.

Click here for more info on ordering these and make plans to pack and pray for a simple way to change lives around the world.

Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit--Erwin McManus

Getting ready for the last session "Chasing Daylight" and praying I'll be able to implement some of this awareness into our Operation Christmas Child team.

Erwin McManus--Chasing Daylight

There are moments in our lives when we're inspired to act and start looking for incremental changes when we need a total change of mindset. We need to have a different relationship with the future. Ecclesiastes 1--everything is meaningless.

One day in his living room Erwin said he was convinced Solomon was wrong in Eccles. 1. "There's nothing new under the sun." Erwin believes there is something new under the sun. Jesus said, "Behold I am doing a new thing."

Jesus says "you can't put new wine in old wineskins." God was an artisan as He created the world. Every human being is created in the life and image of God. When we live our lives alive in the creator of the universe we become God's instruments for creating the future.

Evil men do not wait for permission from God to create the future they have in mind while good people sit idly by waiting for God to create a better world. We can say God saved the world through Noah but we have a harder time saying Noah saved the human race.

After the post-modern world is whatever we choose. Why do we keep waiting for someone else to create a better future?

Where to focus to create the future God has in mind--

1) we need to become the cultivators of human talent so each person is developed to the furthest level When Moses was born he was no ordinary child and no ordinary child has been born on this planet. But most of us die painfully ordinary. The church should be the nurturer of the human spirit. What would happen if the world knew the Church as the epicenter of Christian creativity? "The moment I met Jesus Christ something came alive in me and I knew there were things still waiting to come but I was afraid to let them be expressed." There are a lot of people who are going to die with their dreams trapped inside of their souls. There is no conflict between human talent and the glory of God.

We need to become narrators of the human story. We used to be the best poets of the world. "When I came to faith I didn't know why I believed the Bible. I began doing an empirical study of the Bible to see if what it said about humans was true." We need to reclaim the truth-telling power of the gospel. (Example of Nathan telling a story to David to convict him of his sin.) We need a revival of great storytelling. Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture. Truth can be lost in a bad story and falsehood is spread in a good story.

It's not that hard to bring a person to Jesus when you tell them a story that they find themself in.

There's a future in the creative and if we nurture the wonder in every person people will be drawn to our communities. If we acknowledge that we are a mosaic that God's light shines through, we will find ourself in this new creative order because Jesus has come and He makes all things new.