150 bags--packed with LOVE!

some of you may remember that for christmas gifts for the women in the brothels our team was going to pack a whole lot of love into some pretty bags filled with 'pretty items'--things that girly girls would like and appreciate and when they used them we hoped they would feel loved and cherished by God. i've been meaning to update you. can you tell how packed each of the bags were? they were bursting with love, i tell you. bursting!

here are the goods. i asked in this post if any of you may want to help...um...let's just say that some very generous hearts donated ALL of the above. either gave the items themselves or gave us the funding to buy what we needed. we had so much to pack into the satiny 'sackchens' (kinda cute how they call them in german) that we really had to work at fitting all of the love in :) what a fun problem it was to have. i forgot in the pic above that we also included a mini package of gummi bears and these cute little heart soaps, below. and above, notice the goldschatz that we of course had to include in each bag...

here's our team filling the bags with sweet love...

now assembling the bags was fun, but what i loved was buying it all. i was kinda in charge of that...i had to go to many different stores all over the city for weeks to come up with 150 lipglosses, 150 nail polishes, 150 shower gels...you get the picture.

sometimes if a certain store had a bunch, i'd just load them all into the shopping cart. then people would stare, which was fun because then i had the opportunity to tell them what we were doing.

people would ask, "uh, what are you doing with all of that?" and i'd say with a smile, "they're for the ladies that work on the reeperbahn. we're giving them little christmas gifts." people were very touched. this one man was behind me in the check out line. he was blown away. after i paid for everything, he came up to me again and asked, "are those really for the women that work on the reeperbahn?" i said, "yes! we want them to know that God loves them." and he said something like "wow. that is really cool. merry christmas."

here they are before we cinched them up...but they needed the final touch...a handmade card with a personal, handwritten note in each.

these beautiful cards were designed & made

by my friend amber in the u.s.

what a labor of love.

on the inside the scripture read,

God says,

"I have never stopped loving you."

jeremiah 31:3
then we wrote something like

Merry Christmas!
We hope you have a blessed celebration.
With love,
Krista & Rebekka

here we are working on the cards. 150 handwritten cards takes a while to do but boy was it worth it. the women were definitely impacted by it and could tell how much time went into each card.

150 bags packed and ready to go.
so...what did the women think?
they were visibly moved.

one woman, who usually acts very 'hard' and wants nothing to do with our team, took the gift and began to cry. she turned around and went into her room and shut the door. sometimes receiving a gift of love can be overwhelming in a good way.

the women loved all of the stuff--one said, "you really know what we like!" one immediately unpacked it, got out the lipgloss and started putting it on in her mirror. then the women were saying to one another, "what color nail polish did you get?" (you know how girls are!)

and as i wrote above, the women were especially touched by the handmade cards. funny, little details that mean so much. we were so glad they noticed because that was the whole point--we wanted them to know that we cared about each one of them--

you are worth it. you are so loved. God loves you. no matter what you've done or what you do. he loves you and so do we. you are beautiful. enjoy this little gift as a tiny expression of His great love for you. merry christmas.

we gave out 70 bags to the women in the brothels--we didn't know how many we'd give out because there are always a different amount of women there each week. sometimes more, sometimes less. sometimes new girls and it's their 1st day on the job--some have been in their same room for years. so we gave out 70--and thus we had 80 leftover. interesting thing was, we needed exactly 80 to give out to the women that work ON the street of the reeperbahn. a few weeks before i had asked one of the women i know that works on the street how many women work per night--she said "about 80." so that's what we had. we went out in our normal teams of two. do you know how many we gave out? exactly 80. we didn't have one bag leftover and not a woman was left out. it was pretty cool.

for me, giving these to the women on the street was even more exciting, because these are women we don't know yet--although buddy and i know one of them, our brothel team has only been talking and praying with the women in the brothels...so this was our first outreach to them. do you know how they responded? with JOY. they were so surprised and so excited. they came quickly to us as we held out our basket we had filled with the bags...grabbed theirs..and they were so happy and touched and they were very, very grateful. we got to have some great conversations, too, and we made some new 'friends' (that we followed up with last week).

thus, our bags of love were a huge success...

thank you to all of you who so generously gave:

jeff & sue
karla & joerg
nina
crescenta valley community church
& cvcc women's ministry
amber
sarah & brian
the covenant church
emily & lather
denise
the salvation army

postscript: feb.11th, 2010--a few weeks ago one of the women we know in the brothels told our team that she looks at the christmas card we gave her and reads the scripture on it over and over and it helps her when she's not feeling well (it says, God says, "I have never stopped loving you." Jerimiah 31:3). what a lasting impact these little handmade cards are having on the women! God's Word does not return void but accomplishes the work it was set out to do!!!