When God is in it, even a brown, paper grocery bag takes on great significance. Whenever we go to the grocery store, I do not think much about the grocery bags. They are simply a tool in which we carry our groceries home. Grocery bags are only valuable to me from the store to the car and then into our house. Then they are quickly forgotten.
However, I now look at grocery bags differently. As I walked into the Church building this morning 11 grocery bags greeted me in the main entrance. Each was filled with the specified Food 2 Go items. Suddenly, I saw more than grocery bags, I saw children. Each of those bags represents a child that will not have to worry about going hungry some weekend this coming school year. How much more secure and hopeful will that child feel as he or she goes home Friday afternoon knowing that this weekend won’t be like last when he or she felt the pains of hunger? How much comfort and hope will that bag bring to a single mom who is working as hard as she can but still can’t keep up and cries at night when she knows her children are going to bed hungry? That’s what I see in those bags you are filling with food this month for Food 2 Go.
In those bags, I also see how easy it is for a community to ignore the needs of its neighbors. The greatest resistance our Food 2 Go ministry has faced is disbelief that there are actually children in this community who go without food. The school system knows different and the children know different, but by and large the rest of us don’t. Why is that? How is that? How can we live and work and go to school with people and not know that their most basic need is being unmet? Is it possible to so shove the poor and hungry to the margins of life that we actually start to think they do not exist? Proverbs 21:13 reminds us, “If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered.”
And so, in those bags, I see the power of God’s love and our unity. Whether you can afford to purchase only one item or 10 bags worth of food, every item you give is valuable not only because of the stomach it will feed, but because of the love with which you purchase it. I am so grateful to be a part of a church who does not complain about what is wrong in the world, but rather gives its energy to asking, “How can we best show God’s love in response to the needs of our world?” Any one of us could not feed many children, but together we can and will feed at least 50 every weekend this school year. And I believe that is just the beginning. Others will catch on and they will help and we will all feed more. Then other school districts will see what is being done here and will help children be fed in our surrounding community. You see that is what can happen when people come together to show God’s love. God’s love spreads and spreads and is unstoppable!
In those bags, I see God’s smile. Over and over again the Bible talks about God’s heart for the poor and oppressed. “Who is like you, O Lord? You rescue the poor and needy from those too strong for them, the poor and needy from those who rob from them” (Psalm 35:10). The ones our world tries to overlook and forget, God never forgets. In fact, he says, if we are to love him, we must love the marginalized. And when we dare to love the ones God loves…how can you not see God smile. Is there anything more beautiful or worthwhile to live for than God’s smile?
So, Living Hope Church, I want to thank you in advance for turning grocery bags into something more than brown paper bags. In your hands, they will become channels of God’s grace to the young, the innocent and the hungry. And something tells me it won’t just be food that some of those children receive and you who give will find that you cannot out give God.
Bring your bags full of love this month! See you Sunday!
With Hope in Christ,
Chad Current , Pastor
"For nothing is impossible with God." Luke 1:37
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