A couple of weeks ago, the kids came home from school and I had big plans for them to pack a couple shoe boxes for Samaritan's Purse's Operation Christmas Child. I was so excited about it and was confident that they would be excited, too. However, their reactions were shocking.
"I don't want to spend money on other people. I would rather just buy more presents for us and put them under our tree." Skogen told me after I suggested packing a shoe box. Maida stomped her foot and rolled her eyes. She crossed her arms and gave me a pouty face. When I asked her to change her attitude, she made a comment about not having any interest in helping others. After a short discussion, they both ended up sitting in their rooms for a while to think about what they had said and how they really felt. It was obvious to me, though, that my children were not ready and not prepared to be the hands and feet of Jesus. They had no idea how to put others before themselves or why they should. I sat and cried because I knew this was a reflection of myself and evidence of a family that has not served enough. Well, our shoe boxes got packed and they were packed with joyful hearts! It was a learning experience that didn't stop with shoe boxes. I immediately started praying for opportunities. That night, a friend of ours posted her plans for a "shoe cutting party." I had no idea what this meant, but it caught my attention. Prayers were immediately answered as I literally spent hours on Sole Hope's website that night and at midnight, bought a "kit" to host our own shoe cutting party.
So last weekend, we had 30 people over from our church family that were here for our first shoe cutting party! They all brought their old jeans and some milk cartons. We turned these jeans and milk cartons into roughly assembled shoes that will be sent to Uganda to be sewed. There are areas of Uganda where children, who have no shoes, are seriously infected with jiggers. Jiggers are small sand fleas that enter bare feet and burrow into the skin. When they are left untreated, the jiggers cause lots of pain, lay eggs, multiply, and lead to infections, paralysis, amputation, and sometimes death. Sole Hope is an organization that travels into the areas of Uganda where they have bad jigger problems. Sole Hope holds foot washing clinics for the people in these villages. They wash the feet of the people, remove the jiggers and egg sacks, teach the people how to remove their own jiggers, and then give them shoes to wear. The hope is that they will continue to keep their feet clean, jigger free, with regular jigger removal and the wearing of shoes. The twenty pairs of shoes we made will be put on the feet of twenty toddlers in Uganda! Not only that, but at our party, we had someeone announce that an anonymous donation of $200 was made to sponsor our twenty pairs of shoes to Uganda (it is about $10 per shoe to get to Uganda and pay the shoe makers to make them). I was speechless and humbled. God is so good and works in ways that we can't even imagine.
This shoe cutting party was just a small step in God's plan for our family's service. The party was not just a success because we made shoes and raised money for twenty kids to be saved from jiggers, but it was a success because my children felt like they were doing something for someone else. They understood what they were doing and they enjoyed doing it. If you are interested in hosting a shoe cutting party, head to www.solehope.org. There is a lot of information there, along with kits that you can buy that will walk you step-by-step through hosting a shoe cutting party of your own.
Here are the highlights of our shoe cutting party (click on the pictures to make them bigger!).....
We made and sent an invite for our cutting party on our church Facegroup page.
We received our kit from Sole Hope, which included everything we needed to host the party (a sample of what we'd be making, videos to show the guests before and after the party, donation envelopes, bookmarks to hand out, and an instruction booklet).
After our guests arrived, we piled in the living room to watch the video. After a prayer and quick introduction, we split up into stations that I already had ready prepared around the house.
The first station was the Tracing Station. This was a great station for the kids to participate at! Here the patterns were traced on inside of the denim from our old jeans! The traced patterns were then passed to the Cutting Station.
We made our Cutting Station an "adult only" station. This is a very important step in the shoe making process, so we wanted them cut correctly. Our cutters worked the whole time and did an awesome job cutting hundreds of pieces out!
We also had a Plastic Station. This was a "dads only" station since dads have strong hands to cut plastic. The milk cartons that the guests brought were cut into half moon shapes to be used for the heel beds of the shoes.
The last station was a Quality Control station. This was also a great station for the little kids to help with! This is where all the cut out pieces went. Here the pieces were matched up and then sorted into piles of shoes. Each pair of shoes was pinned together with a large safety pin.
We worked for an hour and a half and got twenty pairs of shoes done. Our goal was ten, so we doubled it! We ordered in tacos and had chips and salsa for dinner.
I copied this picture from Sole Hope's website. This is a picture of some Ugandan children with shoes on like the ones we assembled.
We should have taken a group picture at the beginning, but didn't think about it until the end (when eight people had already left).
We have plans to host at least two other cutting parties! It was such a fun way to serve!
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