Today was the Best Day Ever at TLPTC! Beautiful, Warm Day. Perfectly Lovely. 103 shoppers - it was smooth as buttah.
Most of you know that on Fridays we do all the food pickups and stock the shelves for Saturdays. Well yesterday we made a huge food order (our largest ever) and we crammed food into every nook and cranny of our little place. We kept moving stuff around and re-packing boxes over and over to make everything fit! Well, 103 families later, and our shelves are almost bare. We have a little bit of stuff put back, but it’s mostly all gone.
So, Chris is a new guy – truly awesome guy who saw it all come in yesterday when he volunteered to stock and watched it all go out today when he came back and volunteered to shop. He couldn’t believe how quickly it happened. He said “It was so much food! I thought it would last for a while”. He was kinda sad. I know it’s because he’s worried about where it’s all gonna come from for next week. Yeah, I am too. But, I know that I have a week to figure it out, so I’m not sweating it.
I used to stock the shelves and it would make me happy to look at them all straightened and full. Now, it makes me happy to look at them empty and think about Ms Brenda making stewed tomatoes for her elderly neighbor and Mark making baked beans for his campmates and Carey packing his lunch for work and Julie eating spaghetti with her kids. I think about Vern eating tuna and crackers, alone on the park bench, and I know that he is thinking of us, just like I am thinking of him. And I know that most of them are thinking of us too, when they sit down for a meal, or open a can.
And, so I told Chris that our number of shoppers has almost tripled over the last year, but that doesn’t mean that we start turning people away or start doing less for our families. It means that we have to figure out how to do more. And that the shelves being empty doesn’t mean that we did too much – it means that we did something right. So, now our shelves are empty, but my heart is full because I know that this week while I figure out how to do this all over again, 103 people are including us in the grace that they will say over a meal.