It's been an egg-citing couple of weeks in our Operation Christmas Child world here in Erie. God provided nearly 12,000 eggs and next it was time to get them filled with rings and mardi gras bead necklaces.
A work day was planned on the evening of April 25th and we were blessed when 46 people gathered to help get those eggs filled. It was great to see people of all ages coming together to make light work of thousands of eggs. Unlike other years, we decided to put pieces of tape on the sides of the eggs to keep them together and keep the contents from spilling out. By the end of the night we'd finished all but a few hundred of the eggs.
I was especially glad for those pieces of tape the next day when I was trying to reorganize the bins stored in the back of my van to make more room and had a bin of filled eggs slide out of the car.
I thought we'd have a few thousand eggs left over with nothing to fill them, but God had other plans. One of our team members, Angie, messaged me and said she had a large donation of rolls of stickers--more than her church could use for their packing party. When she brought them over I was amazed to see roll upon roll of cute heart stickers. Now we could use MORE eggs and would need more hands to fill them.
The next evening a local church's youth group spent an hour filling more eggs and last week a local Christian school made egg-filling one of their service projects and completed filling all the eggs we had.
The story doesn't end there, though.
Last week the Dollar General stores had their winter clearance items for .25 or .50 each and I was able to get 277 nice clothing items for only $79.00. Then...on Thursday and Friday they cut the clearance prices in half again. The Easter clearance ended up being 95% off so a bag of a dozen plastic eggs sold for just 5 cents. The egg hunt was on again!
Not only did I bag more winter clothing items for only .12 each but trips by several team members and myself to 15 Dollar Generals yielded another 5,000 eggs that are waiting to be filled.
In the midst of all this egg-citement, we got another donation-a load of 37 cases of paper. This is such a blessing and filled some of the few remaining spaces in the storage container. (Did I mention we got a delivery of 28 cases containing 4,001 baseball hats week before last?)
Last night we had 11 team members meeting to strategize about how God can use us to collect 54,321 shoeboxes in northwestern Pennsylvania this year. We talked a little bit about our upcoming packing party on September 23rd. In preparation for the meeting I added up our stuffed animal totals and...God has already blessed us with just over 10,000 already! And we have 33,000 clothing/anchor items for our boxes. Now we're praying for 17,000 more stuffed animals and/or anchor items--asking God to let every one of those 27,000 boxes to be filled with items that will bless the children who receive them.
You just can't beat this egg-citement.
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