We have finally closed the food pantry at our church that I have had the pleasure of helping to keep going for a number of years. Next Tuesday, February 3rd, instead if distributing food to hundreds of hungry folks, we will have a pot luck celebration of this ministry made possible to help so many for such a long time. There will be no “sign up” sheet, no RSVP or anything that formal. We are doing this like we have run the pantry for so many years–making the announcement and letting our volunteers and God do the rest. We plan to gather between 11:30 am and noon in the fellowship hall, share a meal and exchange ideas and information about the transition to Micah 6 pantry operations.
Micah 6 is a coalition of churches that have pooled their resources to better serve the community where they are located. The have been running a food pantry for a number of years now and our church (which is a member of Micah 6) has always helped them out with volunteers and money from the time they began. The Micah 6 folks found out that they would not be able to continue to use the space at the church where they had been operating their food pantry about the same time the leadership of our church had come to the decision that that the maintenance and improvements required to bring our beautiful but aged building into compliance with current safety codes to keep our day care facility open was not really practical, especially in light of the news that there were now several other day care options for students and faculty at the nearby university that were not available when it was originally decided to open our day care facility years ago.
Many of our members took this as a sign from God that we should house the Micah 6 pantry operations. Our own food pantry was supported faithfully by many in our congregation, so the proposal to reallocate the space in the lower level for such a purpose was agreed upon quite naturally and easily. Work still needed to be done to the lower level no matter what we decided to do with it and some major mechanical/HVAC issues also needed to be addressed, so we began our fundraising campaign to have the means to take care of these things. We were also very encouraged by an unexpected donation from another Micah 6 church of $10,000 right after we announced our intention to house the Micah 6 pantry.
Many, many months, hundreds of thousands of dollars, mountains of construction debris and layers of dust later, our lower level is now ready to house the Micah 6 food pantry. The city officials have been by to deem the area safe for habitation and everything is ready to rock and roll. I know in my heart that this will ultimately be better for those who have been coming to our church for help, especially since Micah 6 has freezers and refrigerators to store the donated food that our little church pantry often had to turn down since we did not have a place to safely store it until it could be distributed. Micah 6 operates their pantry two days a week and allows a visit once a week on either day and ours only ran once a week and had to limit visits to every other week.
We are planning on keeping our assistance program where we pay a small amount directly to a landlord or utility company on behalf of folks in danger of being evicted or having their service disconnected since Micah 6 has no such program at this time. We are also looking into ways to expand services to fill some of the needs we discovered as we ran our food pantry like job application training, ESL, food stamp applications and referrals for bus passes, prescription copayments, that sort of thing, so in the future we could be helping a lot more than we are even now.
So why do I feel so wistful about all this? The most obvious reason for me is the people I have had the pleasure of sharing this “wonder-full” work with all of this time. There are some people in our congregation that I would not know nearly as well as I do if it wasn’t for the hours we spent together working at our pantry. Micah 6 runs their pantry at days and times which will not work very easily for me, so I will not be able to work with many of these fine folks in the months to come. I have formed a bond with many of the people that have been coming on a fairly regular basis to the food pantry (both volunteers and those needing help) and I have a very distinct sense of loss when I think about how things will most likely be in the future.
The good news is that many of the pantry volunteers are also in my book study group, or one of my Bible study groups, so I will still have the opportunity to spend time with them. If I do get a chance to work at Micah 6, I will make new friends, too. The folks that have been coming to our pantry will be able to get more kinds of food more frequently than they could before, so I really need to just be grateful for the chance I have had to touch the lives of others and to allow them to touch mine. I also need to be paying attention to the next opportunity for those things to occur again…
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