This year’s Big Give has been a showstopper!
This year’s Big Give has been a showstopper! We started out with our Operation Christmas Child boxes. Our church brought in 11% of the 575 boxes that we gathered in the San Tan Valley. Our region of the state gathered over 14,000 boxes in total. Next year our goal is to double this! If you have a red OCC box at home, hang on to it and we can add those to our totals next year. If not, you are welcome to use any traditional shoe box as your carton. Many choose to use plastic tubs (shoebox size) so that the children who receive them can use them for their personal items as they get older.
We followed up with the Blessing Bags for Genesis Project. Each year we provide a blessing bag along with the meal served on Thanksgiving at Genesis in Apache Junction. This year, like many others, we built 100 blessing bags. They were filled with small personal hygiene items, as well as first aid kits, and snacks. Each child that attended the 1st-6th grade classes on Sunday, November 21st, wrote a prayer card and created a blessing bag for distribution on Thanksgiving. This has been a welcomed addition to the meal for our less fortunate neighbors served at Genesis Project. In addition to the Blessing Bags, we collected Men’s winter clothing along with new undergarments. As you can see by the truckload, they were happy to receive such a large donation!
What can I say about our Giving Tree? This year’s Giving Tree benefitted 10 young ladies from the local community at risk for Human Trafficking. These young ladies, ages ranging from 9 to 16 yrs old, were “adopted” by the church through Compassion Youth. We had 100 tags on our tree this year for the girls. This was the largest need on the Giving Tree that we’ve seen. I will be very honest, I was a bit worried that all the tags would not be taken, but God showed up and in a powerful way! Not only were the tags all taken within 2 days, but the items returned were more than expected. Stockings were overflowing, snacks abounded, and backpacks couldn’t even close because they were back to the brim with school supplies! I had the pleasure of watching the girls open their gifts on Tuesday, December 7th, at a Christmas party held at LifePoint in their honor. They squealed in excitement at opening school supplies and strutted around in their new robes and slippers! I was elated, to say the least, at their tears of joy. A special thank you to Adrienne DeSalvo for teaching the girls food safety and how to decorate Christmas cookies. I also want to thank the “Small But Mighty LifeGroup” (Jim & Debbie Bentley, Jon & Sandy Taylor, David & Rosy Bretz, Trish Van Alstyne, Michael & Debbie Baney, Bea Lopez – supplied the centerpieces, plates, and napkins, but could not attend), and Rosalie Estrada for helping and attending as well for coming out to feed the girls dinner. I could not have done this without their help, and without the help of you all providing the gifts. The Lord is touching these girls’ hearts through you all. Thank you, again!
Vineyard Pregnancy center was blessed with diapers, wipes, diaper bags, and receiving blankets to pass out to the mothers they serve across the state. These ladies often come from low-income families and cannot afford the simple necessities. You all helped provide some of the essential items in caring for an infant. Not to mention that the church helps support Vineyard Pregnancy Center with a monthly contribution.
In a surprising twist, the valley seemed to have a shortage of robes this year! However, this didn’t stop you from collecting well over 20 robes for the women at Hope Women’s Center. What a blessing this will be to the ladies served at Hope. They deserve to feel valued and comforted as well. This is one small way to let them know that God sees them and loves them too.
Our final collection, not yet finished, is the Arizona Reservation Ministry gift card collection. These gift cards, from Fry’s, Walmart, Target, Sam’s Club, Costco, Basha’s, go to help fund A.R.M.’s school bus ministry. The cards go towards gas for the school bus as well as snacks. This school bus is not a traditional school bus in that it does not take them to and from school. It’s a bus that goes around the reservation, each day is a different location, to provide a ministry lesson, a snack, and local clean-up to the community. The children served by the bus ministry are not always fortunate enough to have a local church so this might be their only avenue to hear about Christ. This is a very valuable resource on the Arizona Reservation and we are blessed to be able to assist A.R.M. in whatever way we can. So far we have collected $875 worth in various gift cards. With the rising gas prices, this is a much-needed gift!
A special shout-out needs to go to the Monday evening ladies’ group, Women of the Word, as they gathered 242 gifts to bless the children attending Youth Haven camps this Holiday Season. Youth Haven is located in Eloy, AZ, and serves as an incredible outreach to the entire state. Thank you, ladies, for doing a wonderful job in giving these children a joyful Christmas.
If you would like to know more about any of our Big Give items this year or to learn more about any of our partners, please contact me through missions@lifepointaz.com
– Veronica Thiele