When I first started in children’s ministry, we ran a church camp once a year. We learned that the kids loved it when we threw out free stuff from the stage before each service. Throughout the year, we looked for things that we could use to throw to the kids at camp. We would grab the free AOL disks at office stores, and anything else that we could find so that we would have more things. Finally, God answered our prayer for more items when a contact told us that her mother worked at a big promotional warehouse. She told us that we could get the items with printer mistakes from them free of charge.
As I got in the car and drove to this warehouse, I was so excited. They showed me all kinds of goodies that I knew the kids would just go nuts for. This place had everything, and I mean everything. We were given little squishy stress balls, colorful lunch boxes, all kinds of amazing flying disks, an assortment of cool pens, and many more items. The warehouse told me that all they needed was a letter on our church letterhead telling them that we would not resell the items. Cha-Ching, I had found the jack pot! They loaded my van with boxes and boxes of free goodies. When we got to camp, we started opening the boxes up. Each night, we threw Frisbees and stress balls and pads of paper and back packs. The kids absolutely loved it! Finally, the last night of camp we opened the last box. Inside were pens and other little boxes of stuff. I never thought about what was inside, I just gave the stuff to my leaders and told them to throw it out. As the kids came in, they were so excited to see what we would throw out that night. I started seeing little boxes thrown out all over the theater.
Then it hit me as I saw a group of boys with wide eyed excitement rush the stage. I knew something was wrong. Finally I spotted it. Three or four boys stood with brand new pocket knives playing like they had swords and they were Pirates. It was then that I realized that we had thrown out pocket knives to a group of 7 to 10 year old children! We had to stop everything and confiscate the knives. I am probably the only children’s pastor in the world who has given out pocket knives to kids at a church camp. The moral of the story is: always check the boxes of your freebies. You’ll be glad you did.
Dr. Robert McKinney
