Manos De Cristo Blue Bags
I have a confession to make: I don’t do food drives.
by Mission Committee Member, Sarah French
To be perfectly honest, every time we pass out the blue bags to collect food for our partner ministry, Manos de Cristo, I just avoid eye contact with the people passing them out and scoot to the other side of the hallway.
I know, I know; Jesus literally told us to feed the hungry, but I usually feel like I am just barely surviving life, and buying groceries for someone else just feels like One. More. Thing. One more thing that I have to add to my mobius strip of a to-do list. One more thing that I have to make time for.
So, I have told myself for many years, I feed the hungry by giving financial support. I happily write Manos de Cristo a very generous check, which they can use to buy food for their pantry, probably at a bulk rate and tax-free, making my dollar go further. Everybody wins! Right?
Well, this approach may have been all well and good in other years, but sadly my delusion was recently shattered by my friend Julie Ballesteros, the executive director of Manos de Cristo. She told me that the Capital Area Food Bank is experiencing record-low inventory, and has been unable to offer the food they typically can supply to food pantries like Manos De Cristo. The shelves at Manos are emptier than they have ever been, at the same time they are experiencing increased demand for food.
Julie showed me a picture of the mostly empty pantry and told me that almost everything they had was being supplied by their partner churches, including WHPC. This was certainly a wakeup call for me!
I should point out that generous financial giving to Manos de Cristo is still a wonderful (and needed) thing. Manos de Cristo offers English, computer, and citizenship classes; a clothes closet; and critical dental care. Financial gifts are a wonderful way to support the ministry.
But I want to make sure there aren’t others like me in our congregation who dismiss food drives as unnecessary. I have realized that the blue bags are not just an exercise to make us feel involved in ministry. They aren’t a just an opportunity to get our kids involved in mission work and teach them about generosity. They are all of these things, but perhaps most importantly, the blue bags are now a critical supply of food that hundreds of our neighbors are counting on to feed their families.
I’ll be picking up two blue bags today, and I hope you will too.
