Turkey’s recap…
November 24, 2008
What an amazing time on Saturday. Our ‘receive turkey dinner crew’ were sorting dinners at 8am at 9:30am they received, checked and repacked 150 dinners that were dropped off for the 10am outreach.
At ten am 350ish people showed up… with their dinners. The buzz in the place was off the chart…The first timers were nervous, asking the, ‘What are we going to do? Wow do we do this? Where are we going? Whatz up?’ They were directed to the three tables where they could choose their location, grab a map, a tips sheet and a name tag. We then all gathered in the main room…
We reminded people about the two great commands…Love God with all…and Love your neighbor as self…we connected the thought to Heb 13:15-17 …worship and serving others gladdens the Fathers heart… They go hand in hand, and when they collide …God things can happen.
We worshiped, prayed, picked up our connect cards and ‘we’ve been here’ door stickers and headed out.
Stories are now coming in. People at the right door at the right time. Mom’s weeping. Kids excited and many, many people receiving encouragement through prayer. One guy was so moved that he knelt down beside his boxed dinner to receive prayer.
Here are two stories:
At one house there was a woman, her daughter and sister, both about 8 y.o. They were so incredibly happy that we had food for them. She hugged all 5 of us several times, allowed us to pray for her, hugged us all again. After we left we could hear them all shouting and singing…singing something like “we got turkey dinner” over and over. It was funny.
The third house was where a lady named Earnestine lives. She was pretty shocked when we said why we’d come–as a way of sharing God’s love. She said it made her feel really special and then she just started to cry. She said it was such a wonderful feeling to know that somebody cared.
I told her that God knew that she needed some encouragement today,and that we’d been to a lot of houses where no one answered and that we had ended up waaay in the back of the quads where she lived, We are here because He wanted her to feel His love. We prayed for her too. We hugged her a lot. I told her to call the number on the card if she needed someone to talk to. It was obvious that she was struggling with something. I told her about that church up near the entrance…Destiny.
Anne
At my work, I shared what we were doing this weekend. A co-worker (Jorge) decided to buy a turkey and trimmings for us to give away. When we were near the end, I picked a dinner up and said “OK God, this is Jorge’s dinner”. As I was walking back to the quads, a lady came out of nowhere and asked me if we had food. I said we had a few dinners left and asked if I could I carry a box to her house? She seemed very thankful and told me she had three kids (14, 16 and 18).
It turned out that she was originally from Mexico. What is really cool about that is that I was able to share with her that the guy from my work who paid for a dinner to be delivered was named Jorge and is also from Mexico.
That really touched her and she started crying. I told her out of all the dinners given out today, God had appointed that one to be hers. I was able to pray with her and with one of her daughters. She cried through the whole prayer. I asked her daughter what her favorite Thanksgiving food was. She said it was pumpkin pie. As we looked through the dinner box together, there was not one, but two pumpkin pies. God cares!
Thanks to all for making this opportunity happen again this year. See you tomorrow.
Jeff
As a friend of mine says, Good deeds creates good will that opens hearts to the good news.
steve bowen
