Angel Food

I have to admit that the last couple of weekends have been really relaxing. Since I haven't been volunteering at the shelter, I haven't had to plan my weekends around the hours I was taking pictures. Chad and I have spent lots of quality time together and it's been very nice. The timing really couldn't have been better since a) we're planning on being gone helping Grandma move for the next couple of weekends, and b) we're trying to get all sorts of tiny home improvement projects done on the weekends in anticipation of putting our house on the market soon.

Although being a weekend sloth has been fairly enjoyable, since it's not really in my nature, today I went to do some volunteer work. It was only a couple of hours, but Chad and I went to our church to volunteer for Angel Food Ministries. A couple of years ago our church joined Angel Food Ministries to help provide families in our community groceries at a reduced cost. Angel Food is a national organization started 15 years ago in Georgia, and it now provides food monthly for over 500,000 families in 35 states. It's a pretty neat ministry built from a very simple idea. Food is bought in bulk quantities and then sold in smaller units to families at bulk prices. All of the transportation, planning and organizing is done by volunteers. You can read the whole history of the organization on their website--it's pretty neat!

So Chad and I went and helped unload all the food from the delivery truck, organize the food into an assembly line, assemble units of groceries and carry the groceries to people's cars. I actually just stood there and handed out eggs for the most part, while Chad had the much harder job of carting out boxes of food. Normally that wouldn't be so bad except that it was snowing, windy and bitterly cold outside!

I'd been meaning to get involved with this ministry for years, but just never could fit it into my weekends (although it's only one weekend a month) because I was usually busy taking pictures at the shelter. I was glad to finally be able to help out, and the experience was certainly an eye-opening one that made us extremely thankful for what we have. Although the Angel Food groceries are available to any person at any income level, many of the people who order are clearly struggling financially. I would guess it must be humbling for them to come pick up the food, and it was certainly humbling for us to be serving them. It made us very thankful to be blessed with so much compared to so many others in our community!