Every year Hope House adopts 60-75 (except for the year
God told me to keep on going and we ended up with 114—but that’s another blog
post!) families for our Christmas list. In these families, each child receives
a stuffed stocking, a clothing gift and a toy gift. It’s a wonderful program
and one of the highlights of our year is the distribution of gifts. We encourage
families, groups and companies to adopt whole families each year, so that it
makes the gathering and distribution easier. This year, we were blessed with 74
families being adopted outright! This leaves us with no whole families on our
list, so we were able to put generic gift tags on our Angel Tree at church. What
that means is that starting yesterday; we began to distribute single, wrapped
gifts to those children whose families did not make it on our list—I put 140
tags on the tree and we still ran out of tags! People brought us random gifts
and toys in their place.
So here is how wonderful this place is. Emmanuel means “God
with us”, and sometimes I think we should change our name to Emmanuel’s House. Why?
We started giving out gifts yesterday morning with 3 bookcases full of wrapped
gifts. We were VERY busy all morning, and yet, at the end of the morning, we still
had 3 bookcases full of wrapped gifts; they just kept coming! He has let us
know many times that He is with us every day, and this is just the latest
example. God is truly with us and our mission at Hope House.
When I squint, I can almost see Him handing out the loaves
and fishes………
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