Menu Monday

If a month ago all I had to eat for the rest of the week was a can of beans, two small packages of pasta, a can of corn, and one more meal in a box I would truly be worried... Now we are so happy to know that we will definitely have some kind of surplus from our four week stock! I look at our shelf in the pantry and I no longer see how empty it is but how full! It really has not been a bad experience the past four weeks- a few days we have been left unsatisfied but not to the point of any real hunger. Sometimes I worry right before the pay check comes in... how are we gonna pay the bills? how are we gonna buy food? how are we gonna pay for gas? Then my wonderful wife finds a coupon for a restaurant that we would never go into because we don't spend money like that often on food, and we eat for free. I laugh at times like that, here I am worrying, and then out of no where we are blessed.

Sometimes the blessings flow in more then we need...

Grandma packed us a box of food while she was cleaning out her pantry a couple of weeks ago. Pastas, sauce, a can of orange juice, cans of fruit, a can of chicken, and a few other things. It was a good variety of food, but we were in the middle of our four weeks, so we didn't even unload it from the trunk of my car. We gave it away last week in an unexpected event at our small group... A newcomer said that he stopped to talk to a homeless man on his way in, bought him some dinner with the money he had and didn't have enough left when the man asked if he could help him get a room in a local hotel. This came at a point in our discussion of Jesus' command to "Go" into the world and find the poor, homeless, hungry, and imprisoned. Our conversation was circling around that word "Go" and how we struggle with it, so here the newcomer interjected, "Do you want to go? I mean, I know someone who needs some help right now. After he explained to us the story we all decided to pitch in... why continue to read and talk about what we should be doing in our community if we don't act on the scripture? I never carry cash these days, but hey- I had a box of food in my trunk! We gladly handed over the food, and a few of the guys drove down to take it to them. They visited and were sung too and at the end of their stay they were invited back for dinner a few days later. On the menu: the pasta that Grandma had packed us. We couldn't make it to dinner but we heard it was good, and another invitation came out of it. I hope we can make it to the next one!