Rise Against Hunger
Dear Church Family,
I must tell you that I am really looking forward to Sunday's Rise Against Hunger event. But I also must confess that the first year we did this event I had no idea what all this was about. Pastor Karl reassured me that it would be great and that I 'd love it. But I wasn't entirely convinced.
Certainly I understood feeding people - I'm a mother of four and I often joke that Food is my superpower. But the whole part about putting dehydrated vegetables and rice into a bag didn't quite make sense in my brain. I couldn't quite envision it.
What about the hair nets and gloves? Well, obviously, we'd need to use those since we'd be working with food - but how was it actually going to happen? Would we be buying big bags of rice? Is this the motherlode of all Costco runs? The answer is no, it's a little more like a kit you buy and assemble and I now agree with Pastor Karl - it is great!
On Sunday, a small box truck emblazoned with Rise Against Hunger on the side will pull into the parking lot while we are in worship. Ariana (our local contact) will park it and a small team will unload all of the rice, veggies, nutrient packets, small bags, bigger boxes, labels for it all AND all the supplies we need to put it all together - the scoops, the funnels, small scales, spoons, and many, many bins. It is really quite a well thought out process.
And then WE show up! We don our fashionable hairnets and gloves and get to work. We scoop, weigh, seal, pack and generally assemble dehydrated meals to go ... somewhere! In the past four years we've packed meals that ended up in the Philippines and Vietnam - places halfway around the world!
So, let me share my superpower with you - Food will be OUR superpower. We will eat together and then we will pack food together. But even more than that, it is LOVE that is our superpower. It is God's love in our lives that causes us to want to share love (and food) with others who we will never know or meet.
It will be a joy to serve together and it will be a joy to share in the superpower of food and love - both wonderful gifts from God.
See you on Sunday!
Emily
