March 31, 2003
ON WINGS AND A PRAYER:
Abilene church supports troops
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___ABILENE--Members of First Baptist Church in Abilene are sending prayers and a sweet taste of home to United States troops deployed overseas.
___Church members are warming up their ovens for another round of what has become a bustling cookie deployment ministry
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| KAREN BARLOW of Abilene displays the prayer quilt she made for her husband, a C-130 pilot. She's enlisting others to make prayer squares for American troops.Karin Richardson |
since troops first were sent to Afghanistan 18 months ago.
___And they're adding a new stitch by making prayer squares soldiers and airmen can carry with them in their jackets.
___Last Christmas, Abilene volunteers shipped 1,200 pounds of cookies to troops in Afghanistan. Four hundred pounds of those cookies were homemade.
___Lt. Col. Jim Barlow, a C-130 pilot and member of Fi
rst Baptist in Abilene, received the cookies and distributed them Christmas Day.
___The response from the troops was overwhelming, reported his wife, Karen.
___"They had nothing to show them it was Christmas--no decorations; they couldn't take the day off. There were a few strings of lights people had stuck in their suitcases.
___"When he opened those boxes, that was the only Christmas a lot of those people had," she explained.
___"It moved a lot of people that someone would take time to bake cookies for someone they never met. It's more than just cookies. It really says to those people, 'God loves you; we love you.'"
___The idea began shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when Jim Barlow was among one the first wave of U.S. airmen deployed to Afghanistan. His wife enlisted volunteers from the high school Sunday School class she teaches to help bake cookies.
___She also sent family
members small quilt squares and asked them to write prayers for her husband on the squares. She then sewed the prayer squares into a 3-foot-by-3-foot quilt to send with him.
___"He could actually cover himself in prayer," she explained.
___From there, the idea caught on, and the number of people wanting to help with the cookies rose like leavened dough. That led to the great Christmas cookie deployment of 2002.
___With the current deployment of more troops from Dyess Air Force Base and other Texas posts, the Abilene church is preparing for a new round of cookie ministry.
___Other churches and Christians are invited to help with the project, both by providing homemade cookies and by providing prayer squares--a quicker version of the prayer quilt that can be distributed more widely.
___Cookies should be placed in zippered plastic bags, then packed into boxes for shipping via U.S. Mail. Federal law will not allow the Air Force to transport the gifts; they must be sent by mail.
___Prayer squares should be made of 12-inch-by-12-inch squares of finished fabric, perhaps layered to give more stiffness. Prayers may be written on the fabric with fine-point permanent markers.
___Barlow has no budget for the project, so donors of cookies and prayer squares are asked to send a few dollars with each set of gifts to help defray postage expenses. It costs about $1.50 per pound to mail the cookies.
___The next shipment date is April 27.
___Deliver contributions to First Baptist Church, 1333 N. 3rd St., Abilene 79601. For more information, the church's phone number is (915) 673-5031.
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