2015 Operation Christmas Child

As a church Felida has been participating in this ministry for as long as it has been around. We started out by each family bringing in filled shoeboxes by a certain date to doing smallish packing parties where it was mostly just church family coming in to pack boxes together (assembly line style) to inviting friends and family which is where we are now. Each year gets a little bigger and better. I think we are getting good at this. The new thing for this year - Felida was the collection center for Southwest Washington and the surrounding areas. 

November 16-23 was that National Collection Week and Tom and I spent each evening of last week at the collection center with other people that also attend Felida. There were evenings that a different small group would come and serve for the evening. I got to take Saturday off as I would be there all day on Sunday. 

It was neat to see different groups bringing in filled boxes as well as families. We had one family that did over 200 boxes and worked on the "project" all year long. There was another woman who had worked at one of the processing centers and also packed over 200 boxes. While those numbers are impressive, what really excites me is the small families where a box is packed by each child - who specifically chooses the items for their special box and they each carry their box in to drop off.

Each kid marching in with their box

The family is gathered around to pray.

I also love real little ones bringing in their special box...

Such a serious face on this little one!

Each box that we receive is prayed over and we always invite the donors to pray with us, most do...but some don't, even though we still pray anyway. I like it when some people tell us just how many times the boxes have been prayed for...it's not like more pray is bad. When the trailer was filled a group of us went out and prayed there too! More IS better - it certainly doesn't hurt!

It's Tuesday now and the 2015 Operation Christmas Child activities are done, but we'll be at it again come January when we start collecting items for the next year's packing party! This is a year round thing for Felida and I want to make it a year round thing for myself...maybe packing my own boxes to bring in or collect, collect, collect for the packing party. 

We sure do love Operation Christmas Child - silliness abounds!

This was all part of one delivery that we received.