Helping hands

I am not posting this to say how great I am, or to brag about what I do. I am just trying to show by being obidient to the Lord, what blessings he will pour down on you! Trust me I am and continue to be blessed!

A few months ago, our youth Pastor headed up a group of people from our church to help pack up food for starving children around the world. The orginazation was called Feed My Starving Children. My wife and I were a part of this wonderful group of people. Our shift was two hours long. We had probably 10-15 people at our table. We had people pouring the food into bags, people bagging and weighing the food, people sealing the bags, people putting the bags into boxes and finally people putting the boxes onto a pallet. I was in charge of scooping out and pouring into a funnel, the soy and rice part of it. I was at the end of the production line. I have never had so much fun doing some thing so worthwhile in my life! Just knowing that every scoop of food you put into a bag was going to feed six children, somewhere in the world, AMAZING!! I think that the final count for people for our shift was something like 247. We bagged up over 280 bags of food that shift. Praise GOD! The total number of meals we provided over the course of the weekend was somewhere in the neighborhood over over a half million meals! Praise GOD!! The people from the Sycamore, DeKalb area turned out in droves. What an awesome event to be a part of.

A sister church in Chicago was collecting toys to distribute for Christmas. This church was broken into and all of the toys were stolen from them. They put out a call for help to our church. We started a toy drive and put a collection box on a table in the foyer. We had a list of suggestions on the table as well. We had to empty off that table three times, becasue it became so full of everyone donating items. Praise GOD! We collected the toys up to Sunday December 19th. Our youth Pastor and I, delivered a van full of goodies the following Monday, to our sister church in Chicago. The look on that Pastors face when he saw all of the toys and stuff, PRICELESS!! The people of our church are an amazing and very generous group! Praise GOD for all of them!

I have been layed off since June of 2010. I was ok during the summer becasue my daughter was home with me. We could do all kinds of things together. When she went back to school in the fall, and my wife was at work, I was at home all by myself. So I started thinking "what can I do, to get out and do something?" I recall, as I went to our local hospital with my Pastor to pray for a friend who was having a procedure, seeing a member of our church volunteering there. That started a thought process in my head, that maybe I could volunteer there also. A few weeks passed, but the thought persisted. So I picked up the phone and called to inquire about being a volunteer. I was asked to come in for an interview and then asked to come for orientation. After all of this, I started volunteering at the front desk in early November. The head of the volunteer department told me that I would get much more out of this, than I could ever imagine. You know what? She was right. The comments I hear from the people that I serve, make the whole thing worth it! Praise GOD!!