The season of giving

If you know me, or have followed me for any length of time you know that the boy and I do our best to recognize how blessed we are, especially compared to others. Of course, just like everyone else, we take a lot of things for granted and specifically during Christmas we find it very easy to get caught up in gift buying, spending, decking the halls, and everything else that comes so naturally to those with privilege.

For the past three years we have put together boxes for Operation Christmas Child and we have adopted a family in our community (or in our state at least) for Christmas. Unfortunately, we have had terrible luck with adopting a family and every year we were left feeling very disenchanted with the experience, so this year we decided that we would opt out of it and add to our prayers that God would present a different opportunity for us to help someone.

Almost immediately we found out that not only would our church be a designated Operation Christmas Child location, but also that Christian Family Services had many foster children in the area that were in need of presents for Christmas. It is a strange mix of feelings that comes with this because we are excited to be able to help, but it is hard knowing that there are so many in need.

We make it a tradition to each pack a box for a child, and this year we thought that even though the baby is not quite here yet she should also have a box sent in her name. So, we packed up our usual boxes and then headed to the church to volunteer on the collections end.

While we were there we met an amazing woman who has been part of the Samaritan's Purse organization for years and we got to talking about what a welcome gift these boxes really are. She has gone out on distribution missions to give the boxes to children in Belize, China, Canada, and Africa and told us that these were literally the first gifts many of the children had been given. Not the first Christmas gifts, the first gifts, period. Can you imagine having never been given a present in your life?

She also reiterated something that my darling husband had already thought of and something that hadn't really occurred to me at all: the younger age groups get many more boxes packed for them than the older ones. I often get caught up in buying cute little girl toys and outfits, so I saw Corey's eyes light up a bit when she mentioned that the oldest boy group (ages 10-14) often has a lot of children that are forced to be men because they are the head of household. I knew that we would be packing another box, and sure enough we headed straight to the store to pack a box that we hope will end up with the right boy. Corey filled it to the brim with tools: a hammer, screwdrivers, wrenches and a bunch of other boy things that I never would have thought of.

When we got home he spent another hour trying to wedge all his findings into the small shoebox - something that could have only happened with divine intervention because there must have been twenty pounds of items crammed in there. And so, the members of our little family of *almost* four each sent a shoebox to Asia this year, praying that each will end up with a child who has been hoping for its exact contents.

We also were lucky to have chosen two local foster children to adopt, a one-year-old girl, and a sixteen year-old (again, thanks to my thoughtful husband who noticed that the older children's names were not being chosen) and we had a wonderful time shopping for them. And thanks to some ninja shopping skills we were able to score quite a bit of stuff for each of them while only going over the spending limit slightly! I only wish we could be there with them on Christmas to see their faces!

I'm sorry that this post isn't written very well - reading back I realize that it's all over the place - but it was important to me to share how thankful we are that we had two amazing chances to be part of a bigger picture this year. We were both concerned that with everything else going on in our lives (any day now people) we wouldn't be able to participate as much and instead we were blessed with new opportunities.

Sometimes getting what you ask for isn't a bad thing at all.