Church 4 Life
Thursday 22 August 2019 – From Gail’s Facebook Posts:-
“Faith means doing everything you can and trusting Jesus to do what we can’t.
My faith is getting a workout tonight. Why?
We need 500 boxes of toys to be donated And packed by Monday… yes, that’s Five Hundred!
We’ve done all we can – sent requests for toys to all our friends via text and fb; we have 500 empty boxes ready to fill and a dozen volunteers ready to pack tomorrow (volunteer spaces still available tomorrow and Saturday); Rhema is doing a shout out for donations; and we are praying like crazy.
The one thing I Can’t do is find 5,000kg of toys in 4 days and get it delivered to our church hall. Aunty Gail’s toy box isn’t that big 😉
I’m expecting a whole bunch of miracles – 500 boxes worth. Please pray and believe with me. If you know any kids or Grandmas or Aunties who have toys please ask them to join in this miracle and drop donations off.”
We had been packing and planning to send this container of toys to Asia so it could get there before Christmas. We thought we had more than enough boxes ready to go, but somewhere along the way there was a miscalculation, and we had the shipping container arriving in two days, no wriggle room on the dates and suddenly we found out we were 5,000kg (500 boxes) short! Eeek!
We prayed, we prepared for toys to come in and then we worked hard to source them, sort them, unpack, pack boxes, toys and then load a container.
The biggest piece of this miracle puzzle was that the day we figured out we were short 500 boxes Richard was in our truck on his way down to Melbourne. Being so far away from Newcastle there was not a lot he could do, except pray. Except that as he prayed God gave him a little nudge to check a notebook he had with him. In it he found one phone number of a company in Melbourne that he had written down a couple of years before. Maybe, just maybe, they would have toys we could buy to fill the container. He made a call.
Yes, they had second hand toys but they were all packed in boxes already. “Perfect!” Richard replied. “Boxed toys is just what we need. However, I have to pick them up on Sunday as I’m unloading my truck on Saturday. Would that be possible?” Yes, they’d open the warehouse just for Richard, but he’d have to do the loading himself.
7am Sunday morning saw Richard loading the truck. It was a hot and sweaty job. Early Monday morning he started the long drive back. Gail and Lesley unloaded dozens of boxes of toys late that night so Richard could head to Sydney early Tuesday morning for more toys from another contact God had suggested to him.
The 40′ shipping container arrived. With all the mismatched boxes from Melbourne, we didn’t know how many boxes we were short so Greg and Gail started the giant game of Tetris, loading the boxes tightly into the shipping container. Our drivers kept collecting toys, our office staff joined our Packing Party in sorting and packing, Gail and Greg kept loading… it was a long, hot job on a tight deadline… but we got there, just in time for the truck to take the container away to be popped onto a ship headed for Asia so that kids there could have toys that Christmas.
This truly was a miracle which included generous donors, hardworking staff and help from heaven.

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Church 4 Life

Gail Taylor

Managing Director

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