On the Fourth Day

(singing) On the fourth day of National Collection Week the good Lord gave to me four carton pallets, three rolls of wide tape, two half-filled trucks, and another great collection victory.

It's hard to believe that National Collection Week for Operation Christmas Child is already half over.  Tonight when I got to the collection center the wall was lined with about 800 boxes so the three of us got to work putting them into cartons.

Only one donor came this evening and brought 18 boxes.  That gave us a chance to get those boxes into cartons.  We worked hard to pack 50 cartons and at the end of the night there was one box left over.

Here it is--sitting by the wall.  

And as I looked at that one small box tonight I remembered why we do Operation Christmas Child.  I saw a little boy excited over the Spiderman pictures on the box.  I watched the joy on his face as he opened a box with treasures just for him.  I heard his giggles and I felt his excitement.  

The box sitting on the floor all alone is really a little boy.

And that is why we do Operation Christmas Child.

On the Third Day

(singing)  On the third day of National Collection Week the good Lord gave to me three rolls of wide tape, two filling trucks, and another great collection victory.

I can't believe three days of our collection for Operation Christmas Child are over already.  I don't have a lot of new updates but I found out that Pat Carter's relay center in East Springfield took in 800 boxes in the first two days.  That was great news.

Things started off slowly at the Erie collection center.  Soon after I arrived to volunteer tonight, though, Rose Dobson came with a caravan of five vehicles filled with more than 1000 shoeboxes.  And Rose still has more loads to deliver!  She's pictured above with some of her shoeboxes.

Rose buys items and packs year-round in her garage.  Last year she packed 1,737 boxes and this year she packed 1,500.  And she doesn't use "GO" boxes.  Most of her boxes were salvaged from our local Target.  She's developed a good relationship with the employees there and they let her choose the empty boxes she wants from the shelves.  Many of them are a beautiful deep red and are the perfect size.

Rose struggles with chronic medical problems but she still works tirelessly to bless children around the world.  She told me, "When you keep working you don't hurt so much."  

She trusts God to provide for her boxes and has amazing stories of how He's given her all she needs.

On the third day we had Rose.

On the Second Day

(singing)  "On the second day of National Collection Week the good Lord gave to me two empty trucks and another great collection victory."

Well, actually I don't have any victories to report yet except that all the relay centers are open as far as I know.  I wish I got reports from each relay center every day and could keep track of how many boxes have come in but maybe it's better that I don't know until the end of the week.  

In the meantime, I've enjoyed brief phone calls with a few of our relay and collection center coordinators.  I especially enjoyed talking with both Ron and Carol Johnson--the relay center coordinators in Bradford.  Each time I talk with them I can sense God's love flowing through them.

Back in 2010 Ron had open heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic and Carol left him there to come home and run the relay center.  It's what they both wanted because of their dedication to Operations Christmas Child.

Tonight Carol told me that when she recruits volunteers to serve at her relay center she tells them there are three qualifications--

1)  You have to smile

2)  You have to be encouraging

3)  You have to pray with each shoe box donor before they leave the relay center

How great is that?  I wish every collection volunteer (including myself) would just keep those three rules.  We'd sure be blessing a lot more people on this side of the box.

On The First Day

(singing) On the first day of National Collection Week the good Lord gave to me another great collection victory.

Here's a picture of my minivan last night packed with 350 boxes ready to drop off at the collection center today.  All over the country similar minivans loaded with boxes have been pulling up to relay centers and collection centers with their precious cargo--each box destined to bless a child in the name of Jesus.

After a busy day at school I headed out to drive to Meadville and Conneaut Lake to visit the relay centers there.  And for the third year in a row I made that drive through heavy rain.  Showers of blessings might have been okay but the downpour I could do without.  (This is, however, better than 2008 when we had 2 feet of snow on the Monday of National Collection Week.)

Meadville collected over 900 boxes already today and there were several hundred at Conneaut Lake.  I could almost picture those hundreds of children a few months from now getting their special boxes after hearing a gospel presentation.

I have no idea how Erie or Warren collection centers or the other relay centers did today, but I'm trusting God for great things.

The victory is already secure.

Pint-Sized Packers

Yesterday I traveled about 80 miles south to Jim Urban's church for a packing party.  What a joy it was to see those boxes filling up and be there when they passed their goal and filled the truck with 7,264 boxes for Operation Christmas Child.

This evening brought another packing party--this time for the Kidz Praisz children's musical group at Grace Church.   I planned to arrive at the church at 5:30 but when I saw the light fading already at 4:45 I got nervous and left early.

We have no light in our storage container and even though I'd moved most of the items we'd need to the front of the container this morning I was still concerned about unloading in the dark.

God sent just the right number of volunteers and the six of us were a great team as we folded boxes and arranged the cartons of items on the gym floor.

At about 7:00 the children burst into the gym, fresh from their rehearsal and ready for action.  I didn't even get an exact count of our packing contingent, but I think there were about 35 or 40 of them (or maybe it just seemed like that many.)

It made me smile to see them so excited about choosing items for their boxes, and I was glad we'd decided to leave the cartons on the floor.  The kids loved crawling around and pawing through all the choices.

We had a hard time keeping up with labeling all their boxes and had to do some rearranging to get some of the lids to close, but in less than 45 minutes they'd packed 200 boxes to bless children in the name of Jesus.

We prayed before we packed their boxes, and I encouraged them to keep praying for the children who will open these boxes some months from now.

There will be nothing pint-sized about the love these boxes hold.

Packing Party Eve Revisited

Today is Packing Party Eve--again.  But they're not my Operation Christmas Child packing parties.  I'm not responsible or in charge.  Tonight my only job is to pray and I'm taking that seriously.

This is my favorite time of my Operation Christmas Child year.  It's too late to be feeling guilty about not making phone calls or doing more to promote the project.  It's just time to pray and watch God bring in the harvest.

But for a lot of my Operation Christmas Child friends around the country this is a big weekend for packing parties.

I'm excited to travel a couple hours south to volunteer as my friend Jim Urban and his team pack 12,000 boxes.  I can't wait to share their excitement as God shows up again in amazing ways.

A few more hours south of that will be another 12,000 box packing party at Shannon Krater's church and over in Maryland Jeff Mauler will be working with a team for the second weekend in a row to add another 7,000 to last weekend's 7,000+ packed shoeboxes.

Down in Florida my Facebook OCC friend, Sindia Perez, is trusting God to do something I can't even imagine.  Sindia was given a great donation by a church TWO DAYS AGO with instructions to buy items to pack as many shoeboxes as possible at a packing party tomorrow.

I would be so overwhelmed by that challenge, but Sindia stepped right up and made her 48-hour plan and now she's watching our awesome God meet her every need.  She's planning for 850 shoeboxes but I'm praying for 1200 and waiting to see what God will do.

In my own area, Meadville Alliance Church starts their first-time packing party at 10:00 am tomorrow with the goal of packing 400 boxes.

Won't you pray with me for these (and other) packing parties that are happening around our country.  Each of those boxes represents one more precious child who will know God's love.

This is the kind of Packing Party Eve that I live (and pray) for.

Reminiscing

Hurricane Sandy has come and gone with no effect on my immediate area except enough rain to keep me from running all week.  So many in our Mid-Atlantic region, though, have not fared so well and we continue to pray for them as they trust God to meet all their needs.

For me, today was a day for looking back; a day for returning to the elemental reason I got involved with Operation Christmas Child in 1995; a day to remember the joy of packing a box and knowing it will go into the hands of a child half a world away and bring him or her joy.

My OCC Church Relations Coordinator, Heather Rogers, was the first person to join our area team when it formed in 2007.  Even before that we had been packing shoeboxes together for years.  

Today we teamed up again to pack boxes in the Wesley Church basement the way we used to do before we started having large packing parties.  One by one we chose the right items to fit each box--carefully matching the size of the stuffed animal or clothing item so that each box was well-filled but not overly full.  

And while we worked we talked.  She encouraged me and gave me perspective on some of the problems that have plagued me recently.  The routine work was both mundane and marvelous.  

Better yet, we had a private concert by the Wesley Praise Band who were rehearsing in the sanctuary above us.  "10,000 Reasons/Bless the Lord" and several of my other favorite songs blessed me in new ways.

I was overwhelmed with emotion as I remembered the encouragement of our former pastor, David Streets, who always got excited about Operation Christmas Child and once asked, "I wonder how many shoeboxes it would take to fill the whole church?"  As tears came to my eyes, I told Heather, "I don't think we would have had this team or kept packing thousands more boxes if it hadn't been for David Streets."  

I remember 2008--the last year we packed all our boxes at Wesley Church--when we had 7,272 boxes stacked all over the church.  They were in pretty much every spare space we could find on two floors of the building and you know what?--no one complained about it.  Instead, people were excited.

Carrying the boxes up and down the stairs (what we've always called a shoebox workout) made us hungry enough to go to Wendy's for lunch--another thing we used to do back in those days when we packed 100 boxes or more nearly every week all year long.

This day was a joy and a balm to my soul.  Something to remember.

On the other hand, if all we did was pack boxes like this we wouldn't be able to bless as many children as we can bless by involving the community in a large packing party.  That's something to remember, too.