Midweek Moment

Last year at Annual Conference in Lakeland, we had the privilege of packing meals for a great mission organization called Stop Hunger Now. Our Bishop's wife, the Rev. Pam Carter, issued a challenge to all churches in the conference - pack a million meals in the coming year. We here at Druid Hills UMC raised almost $3,500 in our Advent Mission Offering to package meals. Another local church, Wesley Chapel UMC, added some more funds and volunteers gathered last Saturday for the food packaging event. Stop Hunger Now provides everything you need to package meals on site. Sixty nine people total showed up to help - ranging in age from 3-91. From setup to cleanup, we were there for four hours and packaged 13,422 meals!!!!

  

Getting setup and transforming the Fellowship Hall 

 

 

 

Tracy from Stop Hunger Now giving us our instructions for the day 

 

  Praying before we started in on the meal packaging

Parker weighed the food bags and Wesley ran one of the heat sealer machines for part of the time, before moving over to the packaging table and also helping shuttle the boxed up meals to the truck.

 

Every 1,000 meals someone got to ring the gong. All four of my guys got their chance!

 

 

At the very end, we got to sample one of the food packages that I had cooked in the kitchen - rice, vegetables, vitamin packet and soy protein. Davis really loved digging in and ate several of the little tester cups.

 

It was a really wonderful day of volunteering and having fun together. It was a way we could tangibly live out our faith as we helped those that needed it the most. Stop Hunger Now will let us know in a few weeks where the meals we packaged together are being shipped. The best news is that the churches of the conference have really embraced the call to a million meals and we are far over that total with another five weeks until Annual Conference this year. We are excited to hear the final total then! Thank you so much for everyone who prayed for this event, donated to this event, and helped work this event. Together we made a difference, together we helped build a piece of God's Kingdom here on earth.

Have a great week and I will see you Sunday!