Operation Christmas Child

Saturday morning, our church had a packing party for Operation Christmas Child. I was really looking forward to this because this was the first event that I've been apart since starting helping with our Women's Ministry at church. When I first came on to help, I knew I wanted our ministry to help Operation Christmas Child because I knew the heart and mission from my friend, Allison. In years past she and her family and friends have put together many boxes at her house and I knew if we came together, we could hopefully help send many more to kids in need.

We planned to have a packing party, where you could come bring your shoe box and if already filled, wrap it, decorate it and drop it off to be sent or you could come help us pack some shoe boxes with items collected by our wonderful Boy's and Girl's Mission Organizations. 

Allison standing behind the sign she's made and puts at an Operation Christmas Child table at our church every Sunday to get the word out about this mission.

The boys and girls in our church did an amazing job in collecting supplies for the shoe boxes. Soap, washcloths, crayons, stickers, socks, etc...lined the tables ready to be packed.

One of the boxes the we sent for two sweet girls. I put a picture of our family in each box and wrote a note on the back of it telling them where we are from and that we are praying for them.

You can pay for shipping online and you can print out a receipt to put on your box to track where the boxes will go. I can't wait to see what country these boxes will go to. I know Mallory is too young to remember this year, but in the future I can't wait for us to track future boxes we send and talk about what country they went to and specifically pray for them.

We honestly didn't know how many people would come since this was our first time to have this but we had a good turnout and got a lot of boxes packed.

We had some lovely ladies volunteer to wrap some of the shoe boxes so they were beautifully decorated and ready for packing.

I loved seeing this sweet Gerhart family praying over the boxes they are sending.

And I loved seeing this sweet boy work hard on wrapping his shoe box. There was a lot of tape that looked like my Christmas wrapping but I know there was a lot of love going into this wrapping process.

I did stand in awe of all of the people helping and giving their time to send some shoe boxes full of necessities and fun goodies for kids in need. Allison sent me the above picture she had seen of a child that had drawn his hand on the top of a shoe box and wrote this on the top of the shoe box lid. Sweet.

All in all we collected 196 boxes in one morning!

I know there is still time at our church to bring shoe boxes so I'm excited to see all these shoe boxes being loaded into a truck and ready to delivered to the hands of some beautiful children! This was a great first event and I was already planning for next year after seeing the response and knowing all we can do as a church family! Merry Christmas!