Food for the Hungry...no, not me.

Yesterday, my church decided to do something different.

Everyone met at 9am for an hour of singing and a small devotional from my pastor. Then we broke up into about 15 different groups and went out into the community for service/outreach from 10am-2pm. There was a huge variety of tasks: yardwork/maintenance at the church, cleaning the local elementary school, visiting tent city or the woman's shelter, etc.

The task I signed up for was putting together care packages for tent city, which houses about 100 people. An abundance of people showed up to help me and we finished our task in about 30 minutes. Seriously, before 11am even rolled around, we were done and done. Most of the group then scattered to put themselves to work elsewhere, including myself.

The organizer of the entire day, my good friend Erin, asked if I wanted to join her at the local Safeway to collect food for a local youth center (Cocoon House) that services homeless kids. Sounded great to me, so off we went.

After about 30-40 minutes, I had given out all my fliers that explained the Cocoon House and offered suggestions of what to buy. I also had decided to start a new cart since the first cart was already full. So here I was, standing with a nearly empty cart, with no fliers in hand, and asking people if they would consider donating non-perishable items to the homeless youth center.

Some people gave me quizzical looks and I explained that I had run out of fliers. However I'm sure most of them thought I was just begging for my own pantry. "Homeless kids, I don't think so! She's just using that lie to get food from us..." I started chuckling when I realised how I must appear to some people and decided it was time to combine efforts with my friend at the other door, who thankfully, still had fliers.

By the time we left Safeway around 1:45pm, we had 4 carts of food to pass along. What a blessing!