Packin' In The Fun

Ahh, now is my time for oodles of Operation Christmas Child fun.  Our big packing party was on September 27th & 28th, followed two weeks later by my daughter's wedding followed by a week of company.

This past Tuesday we had our last OCC Area Team meeting before National Collection Week hits on November 18th and it was a blessing to pray and enjoy some time of fellowship together.

Sure, we have our Chick-fil-A event coming up and there's still a lot of work to be done to collect all those boxes and get them sent on their way.

But, really, I think this is the most FUN time ever.

Last evening I drove to Meadville, PA to attend a packing party being held in a store--a custom kitchen showroom called Tussey Mountain Kitchens.  Every room of this business was filled with items being readied to pack boxes this morning.

In the picture above you can see the guys who were busy using a drill to wind fishing line onto small pieces of fishing line to be included in the 50 fishing kits they made for 10-14 year old boy boxes.  Here's picture of the completed kits--

I can only imagine what a blessing they will be to the boys who receive them.

Upstairs in another room a group of women were busy assembling sewing kits for the girls.  Barb Kurtz, one of the organizers of the packing party, worked hard to sew small bags to hold these kits that will bless girls with all they need to repair or make clothing or other useful items.

The building was full of piles of treasures to bless children around the world.  I can't wait to hear how many boxes they filled this morning.

Meanwhile, our Mid-Atlantic Operation Christmas Child family was praying for other packing parties being held in our region this weekend and I'm eager to hear reports on those also.

Item by item and box by box God is bringing us nearer and nearer to that goal of 9.8 million boxes we're all praying to reach.

And along the way we're all just packin' in the fun!

Not Just Prayer

Family and work life has been in the way of my OCC life lately.  I haven't been as focused on our team ministry plan as I should be or want to be.  Since school began in August I've felt overwhelmed and ineffective as my goals for Operation Christmas Child kind of fell by the wayside.

This morning I was reading in I Chronicles and posted the following as my status on Facebook--

"...and all who were with them were given into their hand; for they cried out to God in the battle, and He answered their prayers because they trusted in Him."--1 Chronicles 5:20 --God has the victory ready for us if we just cry out to Him and trust Him. I miss that victory so many days because I don't intentionally seek it out.

I was reminded of that tonight as I watched 30 people listen with rapt attention to Pastor Pablo Mora, the National OCC Discipleship Coordinator for the country of Paraguay.    

One of our team goals this year was to organize an OCC event in each of the three counties in our area.  But as personal pressures closed in, it seemed that goal wouldn't be achieved.  

Then a few weeks ago one of our team members who'd been on a mission trip to Paraguay last spring told us Pastor Pablo who works on the OCC National Leadership Team in that country would be coming to our area.  It sounded like a great opportunity to invite people to hear him, but I just didn't have the time or the energy to make it happen.

But I and our prayer team have "cried out to God in the battle" over and over this past year.  

And, in His amazing way, He orchestrated three events--one in each county of our area, with this special OCC speaker.  I didn't plan any of these.

I think of how often I tend to minimize prayer by saying, "All I'm doing is praying."  

Yet tonight reminded me again that, as I wrote this morning, "God has the victory ready for us if we just cry out to Him and trust Him."

It's never just prayer.  

Back to Roots

Today I went back to my shoe box roots and packed boxes in the basement of my former church--Wesley Church.  Back in 1999 we packed boxes there for the first time and packed 201--our entire total for the year.  That was a dream come true because I'd prayed for two years for that goal.

Then for the next nine years we packed more each year and watched God give us exponential growth.  By 2008 we packed boxes almost every week--totaling 7,272 of them by the time National Collection Week rolled around.

In 2009 we did fewer than 5,000 boxes there and began to do more boxes in our team's large community-wide packing party.

Still, there have been at least one or two packing parties there at Wesley Church every year.  And, truth be told, if this church and its pastor had not been so supportive of Operation Christmas Child over those early years I likely would not have continued to pack larger numbers of boxes.

So today I walked into the damp, cramped little room that was our storage area for all those years.

I dug through bins and pawed through boxes of fillers.  The set-up had already been done by Heather Rogers but as we packed more boxes and got to the end of the prepared piles, I was on a hunt for those things that had been previously overlooked.

In the past few years I'd gotten in the habit of storing here the items that I knew would be too large for the boxes at our big packing party.  A bin held two new deflated basketballs and I located a couple of hand pumps we could pack with them.

I pulled out the fluffy blankets I bought at 2:00 AM at Wal-Mart's after-Christmas clearance last January and matched them up with larger boxes.

And I reveled in the slower pace and the old familiar camaraderie of packing boxes in a smaller setting with people who remembered the earlier days of the project.

Finally, we'd packed all the boxes we could find in every nook and cranny.  Heather, my OCC Church Relations Coordinator, who has been my packing partner for the last decade, packed the last box.

We didn't even keep track of how many boxes we packed along the way, so we were surprised when we counted at the end and found we had 186 of them.  Just about what we packed after saving items all year long in 1999.

There's something sweet about going back.

Again!

God did it.  Again!

Well, of course we knew He would.  That's what faith is.  But it still delights me in a new way each time.

To see God move throughout this Operation Christmas Child packing party weekend leaving His fingerprints on every detail is incredible.

There are too many stories to tell in one blog but so many of them are strange sequels that live over and over each year.

I don't know why it works this way, but it always seems the thing I feel I have plenty of is the first item we run out of.  This year it was pens.  I left extra pens at home this morning because I KNEW we had plenty.  Go ahead and laugh.

And all that angst I had over the past weeks when I couldn't figure out why the records didn't jive and I thought I was short 1,000 boxes of crayons.  Well---there were two large boxes of bagged crayons left over.

Because she read on my blog that I was nervous about running out of soap, Amy Gibson brought extra soap from Cleveland and saved the day on that front.

Oh...and the stuffed animals?  Well, once again I'm not sure how that happened exactly, but even though my last records showed we were short by 3,000-4,000 we had enough right up until the end.

Pam Dumont from Erie Christian Fellowship Church prayed and hunted and eBay-shopped for them right up until last night with a final count of 3,500.  She was washing them through the night last night.

And there were the usual logistics snafus.  We ran out of boxes.  Again.

We ran out of cartons.  Again.

We only had room on the truck because we piled 12 of the stacks of cartons six high.

There were many, many times when I just couldn't get a handle on what was going on.  And there were stretches of time when I hid in the corner praying while I worked on inspecting radios to be put into boxes (another story).

We struggled all day to have enough fillers and then ended up with 2,000 leftover radios and cases of paddleballs.  Again.

Even with all the chaos the whole packing event was finished before 2:30 pm.

And.....

The trucks have a grand total of 22,490 precious gift-filled shoe boxes on them.  Oh, and there was one more box that was found late and never made it into the cartons on the truck.  Again.

Thank you all for your encouragement, your messages, and most important of all--your prayers.

In these two days a community of 650-700 volunteers from 39 different churches and 13 community organizations, supported by the prayers of believers around the country,  joined in watching God do what only He could do.

Again.

Off and Running

When we billed it as a "youth packing party" I don't think we even anticipated how young they could be.  This little one was SO precious as she chose items for her Operation Christmas child shoeboxes.  What joy!

This morning our intrepid packing party team leader, Elizabeth Randolph, bravely hosted 18 students in 5th through 8th grade from a Christian School in Clarion for a morning packing session.  They packed 1,267 boxes to kick off the day and did a wonderful job.

There were the usual glitches of the day.  The truck was placed in the wrong spot in the night, but, by God's grace, the driver cheerfully moved it when he came to drop the second truck.

I kind of freaked out when I found out that at the morning packing session they could not get 23 boxes in a carton and so packed 22 in each of them instead.  My calculations showed we could possibly run out of both cartons and truck space with only 22 in a carton.  I asked the prayer team to pray that we could get 23 in each carton.

Today, when I got to the church I started working on the cartonizing problem, and I found I could get 23 in a carton.  Then my husband showed up and we had a little "discussion" about this.  He was pretty adamant about putting only 22 in a box.  Finally I walked away from the situation (not sure that counts as submission) and the result was that some cartonizers put 23 in a box but most only put 22 in a box.

I can't wait to see how that works out tomorrow.

Meanwhile, those energetic youth packed 5,650 boxes tonight for a day's grand total of 6,917 in the truck to start the day tomorrow.

My thoughts as I looked around the room--
Wow--this is moving way too fast.  It doesn't look like we have enough stuff left to pack another 15,000 boxes.

Then I made the mistake of counting the cartons of soap we have left and deciding we'll be short 1,000 bars even though I know I ordered 22,000 bars.

Stay tuned for the rest of the story tomorrow.

Get Ready, Get Set

Tonight was the end of four evenings of Operation Christmas Child packing party set-up.  Another great crew worked tirelessly (well, they seem tireless even though I'm sure they were tired.)

It's always hard to know what we should be accomplishing each night and there's always more that could be done.  It's amazing how much packaging needs to be opened and removed to get those treasures ready for easy access.

We now have 14,000 boxes labeled and ready to be filled.

There are always so many unknowns and this year is no exception.

I wonder how these boxes will work out and whether getting them closed properly will cause a bottleneck at the end of the line.

I wonder if the fillers will hold out and the boxes will be full enough.

On the other hand, I wonder if the fillers and stuffed animals may be too large and cause the boxes to bulge.

Tomorrow morning a group of 5th through 8th grade students from a Christian school near Clarion arrive to pack boxes and in the evening we'll host our youth packing party.

So all those questions will soon be answered.

Ready...As set as we can be....GO!

The answers to those questions will soon be revealed.

Memorial Stones

Just as the Israelites set up "memorial stones" to help them remember times of God's goodness and deliverance, I have a journal where I often record those times of deliverance in my life.  And many of those in recent years revolve around Operation Christmas Child.

Last night I couldn't fall asleep so I got up and tracked down my journals from the times of the packing parties in 2009, 2010, and 2011.  What a blessing it was to read how God worked in unique ways in each of those years.

In 2009 I wrote of the night before the party, "I couldn't fall asleep...I kept repeating Psalm 37:5 "Commit your way to the Lord.  Trust also in Him and He will do this."  Then I fell asleep.  I wrote later of the actual packing party day, "Things moved more quickly than I thought.  I ended up sending Jim over to Wesley to get more notebooks which we never ended up needing but he was also able to get candy, which we did need.  The thing I thought we had the most of was toothpaste and we ran out of that first, along with pencils and stuffed animals.  By 1:00 we'd packed 5,577 boxes and we were all cleaned up by 2:00."

Then came 2010:  "This year I thought I couldn't be surprised at the packing party but I was.  About 500 volunteers from 25 different churches and organizations were there and by 3:30 pm we'd packed 12,381 boxes.  We used every single box we had.  It was chaotic and people had to stand in line waiting but it was such a blessing..  I could sense all the prayers going up because I had a peace I knew was beyond myself."

In 2011:  "So many miracles once again.  We got the double shipment of tape and labels (the first shipment was never dropped with the cartons).  They dropped a 28 foot truck on Friday instead of a 53 foot truck but then were able to change it out in the middle of the night.  On Saturday morning we heard that Aaron Crossman who was going to run sound was sick.  When I got to Grace at 7:00 am we weren't sure what to do and then Dustin Craig who runs the worship team at Harborcreek just walked in (at 7:00 in the morning?) and took care of it.  When he turned on the sound "Bless The Lord Oh My Soul" was playing.  Not a coincidence.  ....  the truck was filled with 670 cartons and still we kept packing and filled 16,145 boxes--strange, since we were only supposed to receive 16,000.  Now we have 32 cartons left over than wouldn't fit on the truck and so much stuff left over that we could pack hundreds more boxes."

And then there was last year--when we ran out of white boxes and had to pack GO boxes to get to the goal of 21,106 shoe boxes and still had so many, many items left.

In just a few days I'll be writing about God's blessings on our 2013 packing party.

Because our Faithful God never runs out of miracles to remember.