Stuffed With Love

This Wednesday I got a very special delivery of 332 handmade stuffed animals--mostly cats--for our Operation Christmas Child packing party.

These were all made by one woman--Teresa--who has a goal to make 1,000 stuffed animals by September.  She cuts these from fleece and uses the scraps as part of the stuffing so she doesn't have any waste.  I love her tenacity and her vision.  She joins Pam who has been working non-stop to sew and crochet animals also and has amassed over 300.  Now all we need are 23 more passionate folks busily crafting 1,000 animals each!

On Friday I braved another trip to the storage container and shoveled another six inches of ice-encrusted snow from the front of the doors.  Rose and Kathy met me there and we unloaded a few dozen cartons of paper they've already stapled into packets.  Then we unloaded the rest of the paper from the container into their cars so they, along with Ann, can count and assemble the remainder into thousands more of those packets.  Those 395 reams of donated paper will make almost 20,000 packets assembled by three people. Amazing.

Today I was watching videos based on Mark Patterson's book on prayer-- "The Circle Maker"--when a woman stopped by with a bag of stuffed animals to contribute.  Her mother recently passed away and the family wanted to donate her collection.  So I think I need to pray around a circle big enough for 25,000 stuffed animals.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed as I contemplate the sheer number of items we still need to acquire to fill these boxes,  but God keeps bringing miracles along day by day...

all of them stuffed with love.