When a young Filipino girl received a Christmas gift-filled shoebox in 2000, she couldn’t have imagined that one day she would meet the 7-year-old boy from Idaho who packed the box in a small town 7000 miles away.
And, she never dreamed that she would marry the American boy, now grown up, 14 years later.
This month Joana and her new husband Tyrel Wolfe dropped off their own gift shoeboxes at Samaritan’s Purse headquarters in North Carolina, where Operation Christmas Child is run, and told their remarkable story.
A Lost Letter
Joana received the shoebox at a vacation bible school in Quezon City, a suburb of Manila. Included in the box was a small photo of a little boy in a cowboy shirt holding a lariat. The boy had included his name and address.
She wanted to write and tell him how the box had impacted her. Although Joana mailed the young blonde boy a letter, he never received it.
