Operation Christmas Child

For the past 3-4 years, I have lead the Sunday School kids in giving to Operation Christmas Child.  This is a program that was brought to my attention by a mom that comes to our church.  They did it in their family and wanted to see if we wanted to do it with the ZONE (aka our Sunday School) kids.  We did it the first year and really had a lot of fun with it.  This year, I finally decided to get some of the materials from Samaritan's Purse about this program.  I received a DVD that had promotional videos on it.  For the first time, after doing it for those 3-4 yrs, I was able to see what an impact it had on the children around the world that receive a shoebox.  These kids have literally nothing, so when a shoebox filled with toys and candy and clothes comes to them, they are beyond overjoyed.  It was so impactful to me as a leader, let alone as a mom.  When I showed my own kids the videos, they too were struck by the joy coming from these kids.  We wanted to make it a bigger event than we had ever made it before.  We wanted to give even more to these kids than we had in years past and today was the day we made it happen.

I started asking for shoeboxes way back in August, knowing that I wanted to make it a church-wide event, instead of just a Sunday School event.  We had over 60 shoeboxes given to us!  I talked to our Pastor to see if I could make an announcement to the congregation and share a video with them.  He said, "SURE!", so I took those 60 boxes, piled them all around the pulpit in two huge mountains of shoeboxes, showed my very favorite video (posted on my fb wall to those interested), and offered the opportunity to our church family to be a part of this program.  I'm not joking when I say that after the service was over, nearly every single box in that mountain of boxes was taken.  Couldn't believe my eyes!  People were taking 2-3 boxes each and carting them home.  I knew we weren't going to walk away with 20 boxes this year.  And, boy, was I right!  You see the picture above?  Those are happy, excited kids, because we collected tons of boxes today!

In another effort to make this day special, we decided to bring the boxes first thing in the morning when SS began and then take a walking field trip down to our local coffee house.  We made a circle around the boxes and prayed for God's blessing to go to each of those children receiving them, that they may learn to love Jesus and invite Him into their hearts.  Then, we left to go get some hot chocolate and cookies!

God surely gave us a beautiful day today too!  The walk down there was perfect!  The kids?  So excited!

They filled up the place, finding seats where they could - talking and laughing and having fun!

Pete and our friend, Brian, walked down before we did to get the hot chocolates ordered, so when we arrived, we just needed to start passing them all out.  Worked our perfectly!

Noah and his buddy Ryan had the best time hanging out.

My friend, Laura, made us lots of yummy cookies to eat while we were there.  I bagged them up, put on a little ribbon and an Operation Christmas Child sticker and gave them to everyone that was there.

We had nearly 20 kids show up today (our normal attendance is around 10-12) and several adult helpers.

Look at this great group!  There were even more adults than are pictured here.  They were just camera shy. ;-)  It was a fantastic way to celebrate the gift of giving and the generousity of our kids!

After church today, I went through all the boxes and counted them up.  We have a couple people who said they will bring them this week, but in addition to those coming later, we had 65 boxes.  SIXTY-FIVE BOXES!  Last year we had 20!  People were bring 2, 3, even 4 boxes each.  One family brought 7!  When I decided to make this a bigger event than we had made it in years past, I never thought our small church would come together and pack so many.  I was humbled by their generousity and thrilled that we could be a part of spreading the love from our church and the deep love of our Saviour!  What a special day it was!