resurrection eggs

After school one day last week, the kids and I volunteered to help put together sets of resurrection eggs. They had a lot of fun and were good, fast workers.

We helped fill over 1000 eggs with symbols of Easter to share with families at Hearts at Home ministry.

Catie had fun seeing her friends from church, Chloe & Kirsten.

To Timbuktu

"From here to Timbuktu" is a figure of speech that describes an incredibly long journey. But, deep in Africa’s Sahara Desert, in the country of Mali, there really is a city called Timbuktu. The people there are predominantly Muslim. Earlier this year, Operation Christmas Child went all the way to Timbuktu to deliver gift-filled shoe boxes to thousands of children who had never received a Christmas gift.

Watch the video and read the story here, then learn more about how you can give a shoebox gift to share God's love with other children this Christmas: http://www.samaritanspurse.org/micro_timbuktu.asp

Here is an excerpt from the story:

"Even in the 21st century, the name Timbuktu still evokes a sense of legend, mystery, danger, and edge-of-the-world isolation. You don’t have to be able to find it on a map to use it as a figure of speech, as in “from here to Timbuktu,” meaning an endless journey. Many people think it is a mythical place like Atlantis or Shangri-La.

Timbuktu, though, really exists—and is really remote. Located in the country of Mali in the dead center of West Africa, Timbuktu once was the capital of a vast empire. Today, shrouded in the encroaching sands of the Sahara, it survives as an impoverished little city with a poetic name, a proud history, and a legacy as the cultural capital of Islam in Africa.

Just a few weeks before the celebration of Mohammad’s birthday, over 3,000 children in Timbuktu had a unique opportunity to discover the true meaning of Christmas—the birth of Jesus Christ—thanks to an unprecedented journey by Operation Christmas Child.

Since 1993, Samaritan’s Purse has delivered 54 million shoe box gifts to girls and boys in over 130 countries in almost every corner of the earth. This year, though, was the first time that our Operation Christmas Child project has literally reached all the way to Timbuktu."



“The wilderness and the wasteland shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. … They shall see the glory of the Lord, the excellency of our God” (Isaiah 35:1, 2b, NKJV).