Operation Christmas Child

Christmas shoe boxes.

Our homeschool group gets to work.

Faith and Grace writing their notes.

Silly kids!

All decorated and ready to go.

Once a quarter, we have a service project scheduled for the kids on our school calendar. Since it's the holiday season, we decided to participate in Operation Christmas Child through Samaritan's Purse, a Christian relief and evangelism organization led by Franklin Graham. The object is to fill a shoebox with gifts, treats, or toiletries for a needy child. The shoebox gift is simply a tangible way to demonstrate God's love and share the Good News of Jesus Christ around the world. For the last couple of years, I have wanted to do this project but decided to wait until the girls could really comprehend what we were doing and why were were doing it. Last week, I explained to them what we'd be doing and allowed them to take money out of their own piggy banks to shop for the gifts. They were so excited to go to the store with their own bag of money and pick out the gifts themselves. We included items like books, stickers, markers, mittens, toys, and candy. We also included a family picture and a special note.

After school today, we got together to pack up our boxes, wrap them up, and say a special prayer over them. It was so sweet and heartwarming to witness the kids pray over their boxes and for the special child who would be receiving it. The cool thing is that we can also track our boxes to see where they end up in the world. This will be fun as we look forward to using this as part of a geography lesson to come. For more information on OCC, go to http://www.samaritanspurse.org/.