Noisemakers Experiment Recap

What a great weekend, and it all started with serving at The Pantry – Douglas County.

It was great to open up the Noisemakers Experiment by serving at a great place that Crossroads has partnered with. The Pantry is a very well oiled machine; everyone there really knew what they were doing. And if you didn’t know what you were doing, you were teamed up with some one who could show you what to do.

The Pantry is a food pantry that gives free meals to people who qualify for government assisted food programs. Basically, if you make below x-amount of money a year, you can get government coupons for food, sort of like food stamps only a little different. So what The Pantry does is have food donated to their organization, then they package it all each Saturday morning to be handed out to those who come. Every person comes in the front door, fills out some paperwork and an “order” which tell those is the warehouse where the food is stored what each person needs. There are basic things like canned corn and other veggies, loafs of bread, soup, other stuff. But, if someone in your family is having a bitrhday, you can even get a cake for them!

Desi and I served as “runners”. What does a runner do? Good question…

When each persons order form is filled out, it is given to someone in the warehouse who gets the right food together for that person. When the order is filled a team of runners, ususally 2 people, will grab the bags, walk out into the waiting room, call the persons name, and walk the food out to the car for them. It’s an easy job, but it’s great because we got to actually interact with the people there a lot more. I say it’s easy, but our legs were dragging by the end of the day.

One person that I remember the most is Mitchel Barrington. Mitchel was an older guy, probably in his mid-60’s, who was coming to get food from The Pantry for the first time. Desi and I walked his food out to his car for him and asked if there was anything that we could pray about for him. He said no with a smile, then he said something that I didn’t expect. When I asked if we could pray for him, he said, “No, that’s ok. But I really like what you guys do here, so I’m going to come back next Saturday and help serve with you guys.”

What!?

That’s absolutely incredible. Here this guy who is on a government assisted food program, and HE wants to come serve food to other people who are on in need! That’s absolutely incredible! This guy needs help, but he wants to help! It seriously blows my mind. I still can’t get over that. I hope I never forget it.

We heard other stories about people who last week didn’t have a job. They prayed with some of the people at The Pantry, and by the next week, they had jobs. Other people had just lost a job and were still looking and couldn’t stop saying thank you to us as we carried their food to their car for them. There were a few young women raising their children on their own. Lots of hurting people we were so fortunate to bring a little bit of happiness to.

So it was a great day, but it also revealed something to me.

Doing a service like that once a week is too much.

It really is. Just to be honest with you about it. It was very rewarding, but also very draining. I give huge props to the people who are at The Pantry every weekend. I just can’t do it. It’s not that I can’t do it because it’s hard work; I just don’t have the time. I have a wife and a job that take up most of my time. I wish there was more tim in the day, as we all do I’m sure, but there ust isn’t. There isn’t enough of me to go around to everything that wants a piece of me. So here’s what we’re going to do.

Instead of doing a service once a week, we’re going to do it once a month. Probably the first week of every month. That just seems to be much more realistic than serving every weekend for me right now.

I hope you understand. Actually, I don’t care if you “understand” or not. I took some time to pray about it and really feel like this is the right decision. If you want to complain about it, then go right ahead, just know I probably won’t read it. But I think this will give more people an better opportunity to get involved. Most people don’t have every Saturday to offer because it’s the one day a week most of us get to spend the whole day with our family.

So that’s the deal. I’ll let you know more details soon, when I figure them out. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!