Feed My Starving Children

We attend Southland Christian Church and are so blessed to be a part of such an amazing community! (And I'm so blessed to be able to work there...starting next Monday!!) The leaders have such wonderful vision for the church and what we can do to make a difference in our city and in the world. How can we show God's love? We started a "Hungry" Series last week that really got us thinking about all those who are physically and spiritually hungry in our world.

This week our church partnered with Feed My Starving Children to package meals for hungry children in poverty stricken countries. All of the normal sporting events at the church were cancelled, so instead of going to play volleyball tonight we met our volleyball team at church to volunteer together. It was amazing to hear about what FMSC is all about and what they do to help so many children!

We all put our lovely hair nets on to enter the room and learned how to make the meals, then started 2 hours of work! It was great! Everyone had great energy and they played fun music! We filled rice, soy, dehydrated veggies, and flavoring with nutrients into plastic bags, sealed them and packed them. The guys were all on "warehouse duty" lifting the boxes. Billie was putting the bags on the funnel and I was in charge of measuring the nutrients and veggies into the bags! (They had at least 80 different stations doing this same thing)

Here's a really lovely picture of us! LOL! (Who would think that a 38 week preggers would be volunteering on her feet for 2 hours...ahem...in heels!! Billie is superwoman!)

Sorry the picture is grainy but what can you expect with a phone?? :)

The church has morning and evening shifts Monday through Friday this week for people to volunteer. As of last week the online volunteering sign up was full! I'm guessing there were about 800-ish volunteers during our shift and we ended up making 157,032 meals which is 430 kids who will eat for a year! Wow! That's a serious impact! Did you know it only costs 17 cents to feed one child one meal?? It makes you think about how many starving kids you could feed with your extra change laying around. Kinda makes you rethink the dollar menu too (if the nutrition facts haven't already done that.) The church's goal is to pack over 1 million during this week and I'm positive that we will surpass that! Just to think of what this food means to these kids. It's not just a meal, it's a chance at living.

I just feel so blessed to be a part of such a wonderful, giving community with a heart for the less fortunate. What a great way to spend our evening! Can't wait to do it again next year!