Jesus Loves The Little Children . . .

. . . all the children of the world! Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world . . .

And oh. Oh, how He loves them.

That was the predominant thought in my mind as I walked into the Operation Christmas Child processing center in Denver last week and saw this:


Not sure what Operation Christmas Child (OCC) is? Let me give you an overview. It's a ministry of Samaritan's Purse (run by Franklin Graham - Billy Graham's son). Their mission is to get Christmas presents to children in the poorest areas of the world who wouldn't otherwise recieve any presents - and presenting the gospel of Jesus Christ at the same time. This is accomplished by people throughout this country filling shoeboxes (one provided by the organization or your own) with toys and necessities. We started out a few years ago doing a couple boxes each year with the kids, and it's now turned into a huge family event at my mom and dad's - this year our family did 90+ boxes - it was amazing. My dad has such a passion for this ministry he's now in an Area Coordinator position.

Anyway, the boxes are collected by local churches and then shipped to 6 big processing centers throughout the country. The one closest to us is Denver. At these centers, the boxes are inspected - checked for "inappropriate items," taped shut and sorted into gender and age appropriate cartons. Then they are finally shipped off to the far corners of the world.

I had the opportunity to volunteer in Denver with my mom and dad this year. It was an incredible experience. When we arrived for work on Thursday morning, we were greeted with this sign:
Each morning, they post how many boxes have been processed at this particular center. WOW.

Ready for work!

Here's me at our sorting table.

The process went something like this: Dad would pull shoeboxes from cartons that had arrived from churches (we handled boxes from Texas, Montana and Iowa), make sure it had a gender/age tag on it and remove any shipping money from the box (OCC asks for $7 per box to help with shipping costs). Then he'd pass it to us.

Mom and I would go through and look for what they called inappropriate items - things such as food, candy that can melt, liquids, glass, snake toys (offensive in some countries), army toys (same reasoning), etc. We also filled in boxes that were lacking - various companies donate things such as crayons, paper, toothbrushes, toothpaste, toys and stuffed animals for us to use.

Here's what was hard: I found myself attached to every box I handled - I wanted to make each one PERFECT. I then found myself wanting to inspect ALL the boxes MYSELF. I'm kindof a control freak, and that doesn't work with this process. :) I realized on short order that I needed to RELEASE. Do my best, but not worry about all the boxes I couldn't do. Uggh.

Here's what else was hard: opening boxes that had very little in them. I'm talking 1-3 things. With tons of space left over. It made my heart hurt. A couple of them were just insulting, I thought. So of course we filled them as much as we could with what we were given. It was also interesting to see how few people included shipping money with their box. ?!? Go figure.

But then it was also awesome to see how much LOVE and CARE and THOUGHT went into some of these boxes - some were packed with everything imaginable, and packed so tight they probably required an engineer to get it all in there. And we'd see cute letters from kids and pictures of families, and those boxes made it easier to get through the bad ones.

And it was also amazing to know that when I closed a box up and taped it, I was the last person to touch it's contents before it reached a child in some far off country.

My dad was in his element there - talking with everyone he could meet. He talked with this guy for a long time - an OCC Chaplain from Libya who actually gets to go deliver boxes in far off lands. I'm so jealous. I totally want to go too.

Occasionally throughout the day, the staff stops everyone and they pray - over the boxes, the volunteers, the process, the kids who will receive them, etc. Well Mr. Libya asked MY DAD to lead the warehouse in prayer on Thursday. I, of course, was terribly proud and actually took a picture during the prayer. I figured God would understand. :)

On Friday morning when we arrived, here was the number we were greeted with!

I thought this area was cute:

Damaged boxes could go to the hospital to get fixed. I loved how each box was treated with the utmost respect and integrity.

Here was an example of a good one. I was going to take a picture of a bad one for an example, but I'd get so caught up in fixing it I kept forgetting to grab the camera.

Here you can see a semi outside ready to be unloaded and processed - and there were 5 or 6 of them outside. Awesome. And FYI, each carton contains anywhere from 14 - 23 boxes.

My dad got up on a ladder and got a shot of the whole operation . . . hard to capture the magnitude of it in a picture, however.

My mom and dad - aren't they cute?! My dad is working the scanning gun, which scans boxes with barcodes (you can print barcodes for your boxes online, tape it to the box, and then it's tracked so you can see where they go!)

These cartons are all ready to go to their kids.

That wall of cartons is 10 deep:

Oh, how He loves them.