Operation Christmas Child

I'm sure you're familiar with Operation Christmas Child, the Christmas time "shoebox gifts" for children around the world.  Thousands of these boxes are collected all across the country and then they are taken to one of seven processing centers to be prepared to ship overseas.  And one of those processing centers happens to be in Boone, North Carolina, which is less than an hour and a half away from Johnson City!  Each year we have the incredible opportunity to take a group of students there to prepare the shoeboxes, and that's what we did last Thursday!  The OCC facility is a huge warehouse that has assembly lines set up, and everyone has a job to do to prepare the boxes.  This year my job was to go through each box and make sure there were no items in it that weren't ok to ship, things like liquids and food.  I went through hundreds of boxes over the course of three hours.  It was so neat to realize that the gifts I was looking at would soon be in the hands of children in Africa!  I loved picturing little girls dressed up in beads and toy tiaras, and boys playing with Hotwheels and throwing footballs.  My favorite boxes were the ones where the families and children that packed them included letters and pictures; hand drawn cards scribbled with crayon are the best.  I'm so thankful to have this opportunity to be a small part of blessing hundreds of thousands of children at Christmas!