Souper Bowl results

We all know that the country is in the middle of a recession mess. As of now, my household is doing fine, but if the economy doesn't start doing something soon, I fear for my job. In the midst of all of this, I realize how lucky I am right now, to actually still have a job, house, food and heat (it's cold in Iowa again). There are people that are struggling to eat, which in a country that throws away more food than most countries eat, should never happen. My church is very mission driven, as you know from my trips, but also spends a lot of time, money and energy doing local stuff. Last year, our pastor challenged the congregation to bring in food to fill up the food bank. We were supposed to go to the store and buy the food/brand that we bought for our family and bring it in. The first sermon was on Saturday night at 4:30pm. I went back to church that night during the 6pm service, still Saturday night, and the lobby of our church was PACKED with food. It brought a tear to my eye. By Sunday morning, there was so much food you barely had room to walk. This was done on the spur of the moment, no planning. It took awhile to get the food separated, organized and distributed. This year, they planned ahead and here is the result:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090204/NEWS/902040361

I went during the Super Bowl to help separate the donations, they said it was the hardest time to find volunteers. These are the kinds of things I love to do and wish I could figure out a way to make a living just helping other people, I'm keeping my eyes open. The place was covered with food, cans of everything imaginable stacked all over the place. My first job was to make a path through a mountain of cereal boxes so a cart could pass through. My thought was, easy, I just need to widen the small path buy a foot or two and the cart will pass through easily. The problem was, as soon as I moved one box, whether it be on the bottom of the pile or sometimes the top, an avalanche occurred and small children were lost amongst the fruity pebbles and captain crunch. I worked for quite sometime, making very little progress, before I was moved to more physical labor, boxes of ketchup, mustard and mayo. If my kids had seen the amount of ketchup, they would have freaked, it's their favorite vegetable. Hey, it's made from a tomato, so it counts. Wait, isn't a tomato a fruit? Thought I heard that, but I guess it isn't important to the story so forget I brought it up. I loved helping and am really happy at the amount of food people brought in. Hopefully, the economy will bounce back and I won't need to ask for my donations back in a couple of months.