by Glenda Wiliams, BNc correspondent
GENEVA, AL (BNc) — Joy Galloway, Kellee Jackson, Maggie Moyer and Wanda Cannon worked all year buying items to be packed and shipped to Panama for the 2010 Operation Christmas Joy project. 
This year’s backpacks were filled for the school in Santa Fe Darien as well as collected teaching supplies for teachers. 206 backpacks, 71 teacher bags, shoeboxes filled with gifts, medical supplies and other items were packed and shipped from the Geneva church building.
Backpacks were stuffed tightly with school supplies, hygiene items, clothes, toys, candy, and about anything a child living in poverty could ever imagine. Hand gardening tools and packets of seed were included for the parents to grow something to help feed their family. A Spanish New Testament was included in each backpack and teacher’s bag along with a history of Jesus book. The gifts were shipped to the Panama Missions warehouse in Montgomery. 
The 2010 Operation Christmas Joy shipment to Panama was loaded on Friday, October 29, at the Panama Missions’ warehouse in Montgomery and taken to Savannah, GA where it was to be loaded onto an open ship to be transported to Panama.
In early December a group from different parts of the country will arrive in Panama to help distribute joy all over Panama. Calculations were 4,317 shoebox gifts and 1,725 gift bags, plus many dresses, other new and used clothing, Bibles, songbooks, custom cabinets and supplies for clinic and more were in the shipment.
Larry Brady, Director of Panama Missions said, “This is what Christians do. We serve others.” For more information visit www.panamamissions.org.
As a teenage girl, I prayed to marry a preacher. I knew no one who was desiring to be a preacher but each night I knelt by my bed and prayed, “Lord, if I am capable of being a preacher’s wife I would like to marry a preacher. If not, just let me marry a Christian.” God answered that prayer for me. Our local preacher, Jerry Humphries, preached in two gospel meetings that summer and invited a young man from Alabama Christian College (now Faulkner University) to preach in his absence. He brought his girlfriend with him so that took him out of the running. But when I learned they were coming back in a week or so, I asked if they didn’t have some fine young man they could bring down and let me meet. The girl thought for a minute, snapped her fingers and said, “Old Doug.” Old Doug and I have been married 53 years and have two children and two grandchildren. All our children are faithful members of the church. God is so good. I love Him so.