Philippines Sharing Begins NOW!

Wonder what the new blog background is all about? Airplane? Clouds? If you have been hanging around my blog much in the past few months, you will remember that I went on a trip to Cebu, Philippines to distribute shoe boxes with Operation Christmas Child. Some of you may have been around for my journey as I was getting ready to go. I also promised to share about the trip here once I returned, well I am ready! Everyone told me that it would take me some time to process everything that I seen and done in order to share with others but I didn't believe them. Well, they were right! It took me a week just to get my sleep back on schedule! But enough about that, it is time for some pictures and stories- God's stories! [...]First of all I want to share about how all of this came to be. People hear about my trip and immediately they share how they would love to go on a trip like this. Well let me tell you, it had NOTHING to do with this trip coming to be! God has done some pretty amazing things through this ministry and my life before this but for sake of time I will just share about how the trip came to be.

I began praying to go on a distribution trip in July of 2012. You ask me how do I remember that? Well because I wrote it in my prayer journal and dated it. Truthfully I never expected it to come true but I figured hey, what could it hurt to ask. So I did. Faithfully! Until- I found out I was pregnant with my third son in November 2012. I crossed it off my prayer list because there was no way I could go pregnant or with a new baby, right? I didn't think anything else about the request. The staff with Operation Christmas Child told me they needed to speak with me about something important. Huh? What did I do? They acted like it was so serious. Was I in trouble?

Perhaps this is a good time to tell you I am a year round volunteer with the ministry. What is that? It means that I work year round to promote the packing of shoe boxes by teaching and encouraging new churches, businesses, and individuals to start or continue packing shoe boxes. Perhaps you do not know about packing a shoe box. (I want to make sure this makes sense to ya ;) You can get more information about how to pack a shoe box and what else the ministry does at the Operation Christmas Child website. Now back to where we left off.

Time for the call came. I waited anxiously. The phone rang. The WHOLE STAFF was on the phone! Seriously? I was in big trouble, I could feel it. Then it came, "We want to invite you on a distribution trip to the Philippines!" I think I froze. DO WHAT? Is this a joke? Nope. Sure enough. God gave me a distribution trip even after I had quit praying. Little did I know how He was going to use this trip to not only change me but open my eyes too.

So now I want to begin telling you a little every day for the next week about the trip. There are so many stories and pictures I can not begin to even share them all. But I will try to summarize the best I can and share the best of the best pictures with you. So stick around, the best is yet to come! Oh! And here is you a teaser picture for the next post! Can you guess what it is?