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• How to truly celebrate Christmas from A Holy Experience
  
  
• Ideas for creating Chritmas On Another Level
  
  
• Operation Christmas Child 
  pack a shoebox | a real story | check out the organization on Charity Navigator
• Making Happy Feet from Isabel
  

  Hello people of the world. I have seen this stuff before, I mean kids in poverty. I have been there.

  I want those kids to know that someone is thinking and praying for them from far away. 

  And even if you don’t have the money to buy shoes you can still pray and think of them.
  

  Hey and if you have shoes, you can donate them with a letter to give to the kid who gets your shoes just to tell them who you are and that you will pray and think of them (here is our email if you want to donate.shoesforkids@comcast.net).

  Some kids take letters like that and save them for their whole life. They love to hear that people care.
   

• Buy One Give One
  10 Different ways to help make a positive difference while buying gifts for the ones you love.
  Great Tom’s Shoes animation

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a little something to think about this holiday season…

I bring 3 boxes of cookies. I say I have enough for the whole congregation. I give three boys in the front row the 3 boxes. They are now three smiling boys. 
I ask the congregation if they are happy? They stare blankly. But, I say, there ARE enough cookies for everyone. The boys at the front just have to share. They just have to distribute the cookies. And if they don’t share? Well… I guess the rest of us go hungry? Two of the three smiling boys in the front row squirm a bit awkward.
I look around the sanctuary and I tell them what someone told me after I returned from Guatemala and I had felt it’s sharp edge along the skin, “God gives the world enough of what it needs. He just doesn’t distribute it.”

— from A Holy Experience

I want to cup their faces, look into their eyes. What are you doing here? You were not made for this. I am no better and I don’t know why I wasn’t born here, why my children weren’t born here and we all could have been. We all could have been. 

Child, we are next door neighbours, you and I, and I am next to you, and there are no miles between who I am and who you are and you are my mirror, a manifestation of my soul and all my righteousness is far filthier than your rags and I can feel it in my gut — the haunting ache of my own poverty of spirit — echoing, echoing.

…

I fill each cup to the rim for children living on the rim. I fill a cup that looks like the basin for a small blender. I swallow hard. I fill a cup that is a white cowboy boot with a spur. My heart can feel it’s forcing sharpness. Get moving God! Do Something! Move your people! Wake up! Wake up! Come riding!

…

reblogged from Holy Experience