Shoe Boxes
Good morning from Westminster, MD!
Last night my wife and I, along with my family and people I work with at our business, had the opportunity to do something really neat – we packed shoe boxes! While that might sound strange, these were not any old shoe boxes. A number of years ago Samaritans Purse, an organization that does a lot to help people all around the world, decided to start Operation Christmas Child. The focus of Operation Christmas Child is reaching out to children around the world with the message of hope found in Jesus and Christmas. They do this in part by distributing shoe boxes packed with gifts and a note about the love of Jesus. However, instead of packing all of the shoe boxes themselves, Operation Christmas Child partners with people and organization around the United States that volunteer to pack the shoe boxes. In fact, by taking this approach they have been able to collect and distribute over 100 million shoe boxes!
In 2001 Taylor Technologies and the Taylor foundation decided they wanted to be a part of this awesome program. Over the past thirteen years they have gone from packing just a few boxes to setting a goal of packing over 25,000 boxes this year! This is where last night came in. In order to make this happen, they asked volunteers to put together teams with the goal of packing 500 boxes over a couple of hours. We decided this would be a neat opportunity for our company to give back and give back they did. Last night a group of around thirty of us, that included employees and their families, were able to pack over 800 shoe boxes. We are very thankful to have such great people and to be able to serve with them in this way. A few pictures from the evening’s activities are below.
One of the neat things I was able to share with the group last night is that Operation Christmas Child distributes boxes in Nicaragua. In fact, I had the chance to witness one of the distributions when they stopped by the orphanage in El Canyon. It was a great blessing to see the joy those simple shoe boxes brought to the kids. It was also a special moment for me as I had packed shoe boxes in the United States earlier that year.
If you would like to find out more about Operation Christmas Child, you can visit their website at http://www.samaritanspurse.org/occ.
– James Belt
In2theRiver 