Have I mentioned how much we are loving homeschool? One of my favorite advantages to homeschooling is that it leaves us time and flexibility to help with different service activities that take place during normal school hours. Today we were able to help with "Operation Christmas Child" at a church located just a few miles from our house.
We have helped pack shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child since Morgan was a baby. For the most part, this has meant that each one of our children decide the age and gender of the child they want to pack for. Then we take them to the store and they fill their boxes with toys and clothing items and school supplies. Usually they try to include a short note or a picture they have colored themselves. Sometimes we pray over the boxes before we drop them off as we think about the child somewhere on the other side of the world that might hear about Jesus for the first time in their life because of this ministry. This year Nolan even got involved in picking out his own items. I told him to pick out toys and things that he would like to play with and he took off! As I followed behind him, he threw items in a cart and then ran off for more. It was fun watching him go! And when he was done, we had more than enough items to fill a plastic box. LOL
We took our boxes to our church a few weeks ago and when I put them on the back table, I noticed that there was a sign-up sheet for volunteers to go to this other area church and count the individual boxes and package them up to be shipped to the National headquarters. Things also needed to be sorted and counted and added to boxes that weren't as full. Most of the time slots were during the day and in previous years we wouldn't have been able to help out. But this year is different (yea!) and so Morgan and Marissa went over with Nolan and I this morning and waited for the boxes to arrive. (Unfortunately, it was a slow morning and we didn't get to process too many new boxes but they were still able to stay busy. In fact, when their two hour session was over, they asked if they could stay for another hour to keep working.)
A few boxes were dropped off and they were quickly double checked and then packed together in larger boxes. The boxes had to be numbered with a box number and the quantity of shoeboxes packed inside.
The girls were able to go through several bags of goodies and lay them out on the tables according to the gender and ages.
Empty shoeboxes were labeled and made ready for a "packing party" that was going to happen later tonight.
Hopefully by the end of the week, all four walls of the church sanctuary will look like this!!
Even though I had taken Nolan to "help", he wasn't as interested in the process as I had hoped. Since things were slow anyway, I took him off to the nursery where he pretended to "be a wittle boy"....
....and a "scarrrry piwate"....
I'm glad that the girls were able to be part of this ministry, even at such a smaller capacity. And although they were disappointed that things weren't busier, it was a great time to talk about serving others in the small, and sometimes "boring" stuff.
Who knows, maybe we can go to the national headquarters in North Carolina for a field trip next year and see it on a much larger scale!!
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