Saturday, January 23, 2010

Breaking Bread



One day in the not so distant future I’m going to figure out just how many breakfasts we’ve delivered through our church’s New Hope Outreach Center. I can’t even recall what year we began, thanks to the efforts of Missy Sarver and a handful of faithful volunteers, but it’s been an adventure in ministry every step of the way.

We started out with the idea of serving people who, in theory, would come to Pleasant View UMC weekly for a hot meal and other services we might provide. But God quickly turned that idea upside down and showed us that we were to go out into our mission field, meeting people where they were, and feeding them not only breakfast every Saturday morning, but also fellowship, encouragement, and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

To my knowledge, we’ve only had to abandon our efforts two Saturday in many years, and both of those were due to winter weather. We’ve shared Christmas greetings from the children in our church, cards from our kitchen team, and countless smiles and hugs from our dedicated delivery teams.

I’ve written about this ministry here before, but I was on the schedule to cook this morning and for some reason I felt compelled to document it from the kitchen. Maybe someone reading needs to know what we’re all about, so here it is, with apologies for the poor quality of my cell phone photos…

This is Ellen. She always beats me to the church on Saturday morning and she's a sweetheart. She's smiling...really.

Typically she mans the oven and I take care of laying out the boxes and pantry food (i.e., fruit, oatmeal packets, etc.) Today's menu: Sausage, eggs, biscuit, fruit, oatmeal. We put together 30 meals at a time.


First we box 'em, then we bag 'em...we've gotten pretty good at it over the years. It's too early for me to be doing math, but here are 81 meals, ready to go.


Now we wait for the delivery volunteers to show up. There are six routes in Abingdon and Washington County. At 8:40 Ellen and started getting a little nervous (it's not good if our drivers doesn't show up), but they all came and here are some of their smiling faces. (My apologies to the others...I forgot to save three of the photos on my phone.)

Karen and her sweet mama, Betty were bound for White's Mill and Senior Drive.

David was heading toward Bradley St. and Washington Court!

And Robbie and Marty were delivering meals to A and B Streets and the big apartment complex! (Doesn't Marty look excited?)

"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'" ~ Matthew 25:40

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Love the documentary! Great job, all!