Our church doled out boxes for Operation Christmas Child today. This pulls hard at my heartstrings. I don’t want any child in any country or of any faith to forgo the joy of opening a box of something for Christmas. I cannot write this without knowing that the world is awash right now – always – in hatred, bile, and using children as weapons for lousy human beings to hang on to power, but that seems so overwhelming, and a few Christmas boxes are doable and small. Our kids will each do one, and then we’ll fill several as a family, and send them on to wherever they go with great prayers of touching a heart.
Every year, this reminds me of the time my wife and I pulled into a shopping center in Pasco, Washington, where I was working.
The parking lot sloped downward from the access road, and we could see below us that the place was packed just weeks before Christmas. We pulled off the main road and stopped the car: half a dozen firetrucks and maybe a dozen police cars were at the entrance, all with lights ablaze. It looked like something from CNN on a Friday night in Chicago.
With the twins in tow, we worry about these things. We can both run, but it’s hard to run and protect your daughter from gunshot at the same time. Sometimes wisdom tells you to stay home. We waited a minute to see what was happening – people were still coming and going in and out of the store. Then we saw what looked like a conga line emerge from the store. I’m talking about policemen and policewomen and firefighters – all decked out in their regalia – each carrying bags and boxes of stuff that were clearly too much for any one person to manage. Dancing around each cop or firefighter were two or three kids. Weirdly, in the middle of this scene that had us locking our car doors, EVERYONE was having a great time. My wife, always quick with the internet, figured out lickety-split that this was the day that public service workers in town took kids Christmas shopping. The kids picked out toys, and the cops brought Christmas dinner fixins home to mom and dad. I see this, and think we can fight all day long on X about the meaning of Christmas and pagan theology, and I think we miss every single point of the Gospel in doing so. This is loving your neighbor. This is treating others in the way you would like to be treated.
On that note, I’ll say that I’m not always a fan of Samaritan’s Purse – Franklin Graham’s organization that heads this up. Of late, I’m especially not a fan of Franklin Graham. I talked to my pastor, who said the church’s only involvement is to hand out boxes and, come November, to cart them to a designated collection place. The Samaritan’s Purse website states that since 1993, some 232 million – million with an M – shoe boxes have been delivered to kids in over 170 countries. In 2024, 11.9 million shoe boxes were collected. I’m just curious enough to wonder if there are boxes collected and not delivered, and how many.
As curious as I am, I can’t figure out how they make money off this. Maybe they don’t, and they have my great blessing for that. They make the boxes, true, and charge three bucks for them unless you buy in bulk. I’m not sure what my church does, but I can’t believe Samaritan’s Purse makes much off the sale of boxes. Of course, they don’t fill them; I do, so that’s a free deal for them. As far as I know, they ship them around the world, where people offload them and deliver them to distribution centers. Workers there hand them out or take them to locals who do the work. I can pay ten bucks for tracking of the box – I’ll probably have to do that for the girls – but think this is a lot like me asking you to sign up for my Substack email. There’s no charge to you because you’re giving me your most valuable commodity – your email address.
That’s my take. If you know something more, I’d love to hear about it. If you’ve done this or plan on doing it this year, I’d love to hear about it. If you need a Christmas box, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do for you.
Thanks to all. And an early Christmas blessing to you!
But I must say…I always like both sides of the story. Or the three or four sides. You won’t look far before seeing detractors. I did and wasn’t moved. Most just don’t like Franklin or his faith. Some complain that the local economy is disrupted by the boxes. I truly don’t know, but imagine that many of these boxes go where there is hardly a hint of a local economy. If giving away toothbrushes to twelve kids disrupts the economy, I hope we can give more than a Christmas box.
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