  Operation Christmas
Child On November the 8th during the Sunday School hour, over 60 people of all ages worked together
in Room 307 to wrap and fill 81 shoeboxes for this annual project. Wow! What an outpouring
of love, kindness, and generosity! Thank you to everyone in
the congregation for bringing in your empty shoeboxes and donating wrapping paper. Thank you
to the Youth Group who wrapped 40 of those boxes in one evening back in October. Thank you
to Jennifer Noah, Quilters, Ladies’ and Men’s Bible Studies, and Nancy Moore for wrapping additional boxes before
our “packing party”. Then we needed all of the items for the boxes! Thanks to everyone
in the church who donated these many items. Thanks to Jim Borke for getting toothpaste
and toothbrushes from MCG. Large quantities of items were also purchased with the money from the Sunday
School mission offering fund. (This is the money the children bring each week for their offering.)
Thank you to Diane Hess for coordinating this part. Putting it all together was truly a community
effort. Our confirmation class and High School Bible class students were a great help at the packing party
on the 8th. They helped the younger Sunday School students fill their boxes. They
kept things organized, and they helped bring all of the wrapped boxes back up to the walkway. The grand total of shoeboxes filled
this year was 114! 81 boxes from the packing party and 33 boxes that were filled by member families!
We surpassed our total from last year by 7! These boxes were taken to the local collection center
at Warren Baptist, where they were loaded into a tractor-trailer truck that will take them to a larger distribution center.
The boxes are checked and Gospel message books in many languages are added to them. These boxes
will travel all over the world to bring Christmas joy to children who otherwise would receive nothing for Christmas. The story doesn’t
end there! We also had money donated to cover the shipping cost of each of our boxes. Thank
you to our church members who included $7 checks in their shoeboxes, or who donated money to cover these costs.
Thank you to Clarice Patzer for applying to and receiving $500 from Thrivent Financial to cover shipping
for 72 of the boxes. The rest of the costs were again made possible by the Sunday School’s mission
offering fund. Check out photos from this project on our ORLC website! And thanks
again for the great effort to spread God’s love and Word! Joy to the world! Janet Hesse
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