...and a woman with $950 telling me to keep feeding these guys.

The Baseball Trip is done and in the book, but not in the blog. Man, talk about your good intentions. I had planned on tossing something out each night, but...... I got in pretty late every night. And because i was the only driver on the trip, I tried to be responsible and get a decent amount of sleep each night when I had to drive the next day.

Tons of things happened and there are some great stories to be told from that trip, but it might be a week before I get a chance to wrap up that blog with those. Oh well......

Tonight felt like a sprint all the way to the end. I was delayed getting out of school, Twig was out of town and I had to do something down near the beach before I could start shopping for the food. Add to all that the fact that I really wasn't sure what we were going to cook even as I was walking into Sam"s Club at 5:15 and that's when the race started.

I decided on Sloppy Joe's but Sam's doesn't sell bulk cans of it and I didn't have a recipe for homemade sloppy joe, so I just winged it and bought 25 lb. of ground chuck, a big can of tomato sauce (I thought about using ketchup but was talked out of it), some Worcestershire sauce (easier to spell than say), buns and instant mashed potatoes.

I got to the church a little after 6 and a couple of people were already there. We started cooking and people started coming in to help. We had a good group there tonight, especially considering today was the first day of public school.

Helping tonight :

Martin Chandler Taylor Meredith Jon Hill J. Boggs Liz Danielle Emory Katherine Lainey Caroline Theresa Bryan Anna Ellen John Michael "Can do" Candace me

The sloppy joe was good, in spite of everything me and John Liverman did to it. We were throwing in everything we could think of to get it right. He thought Texas Pete was the answer so he poured some in and I thought Vinegar would do the trick, and we just kept going back and forth with stuff. It wound up good but I'm not sure why.
And you know what? I'm not a big "instant" anything guy, but the instant mashed potatoes we buy at Sam's Club are really, really,good. I'm talking...better than they have a right to be. (That came off a little Larry King-ish, didn't it? Sorry.)

I was concerned when the final product was ready because I knew if we had a big crowd tonight, we would run out of Sloppy Joe. I had 160 buns. 2 apiece would feed 80 people. That's cutting it close, lately. But I tend to worry about that every week, so.....
I'd also bought carry-out plates so we could fix them and close them up to hand out in case it rained, but the closer it got to Showtime, the less rain seemed a threat so we did it the way we usually do.

There was only a couple of people waiting at the first stop, so i thought maybe we'll be all right.

WRONG

We had 38 people at the first stop and we gave them 2 the first time through and no seconds. Danielle was in charge of putting sloppy joe on the buns and did a great job on the portions.
BUT.. as we finished up there, I looked at the amount of sloppy joe we had left. Not enough to make me feel okay about it lasting at the next stop. We prayed and made a point to ask God to help us stretch it to meet the needs ahead of us.

Next stop we had 14 people walk up before the Mercy House even let their guys out to eat. So I gave Bryan some money and sent her to Burger King to get 40 Whopper Jr's off the dollar menu. While they were gone we started to run out of buns so I gave Jon Hill some money to go buy more buns around the corner at the convenience store. Meanwhile 20 guys who haven't eaten yet are waiting patiently. I told them they could have the sloppy joe on top of their mashed potatoes if they wanted to go ahead and eat. Some did and others waited. The 2 packs of buns and 2 loaves of white bread came back with Jon and we started up production again. Then the Whopper Jr's came and we started doing seconds with those.

Run out of meat.
Right at 180 sloppy joes and still needed Burger King's help.
Making a bun run at a convenience store in a sketchy part of town.
Going through 7 gallons of Tea and 4 gallons of water.

See why I said it felt like a sprint?
We were hustling the whole time trying to stay ahead of what was coming. I never really felt like we had it knocked and could relax.
The great thing about tonight was the way some of the folks stepped up and served the Kingdom like CHAMPS tonight. People like John Liverman. Like Bryan Campbell. Jon Hill. Candace. All of the youth at the 2nd stop. Great job by everybody.

While I'm at it........
There are a couple of folks who have been coming every week for a long time now, and every week they come in and immediately start doing the jobs most of us would try to avoid. Cooking on the grill, chopping stuff, making the Tea, that's fun. But Bryan, Theresa, and Anna come and jump into washing the dishes that we mess up, wiping down the tables we spill stuff on ,and a ton of other not so fun and never glamorous jobs that need to be done. I even feel bad once in awhile and try to help them and they run me off. A lot of nights when we finish cooking and head upstairs to start feeding, they stay down and do as much cleaning as they can so that there's very little left for us to take care of when we come in after the last stop.
That's a servant attitude that I lack alot of times and it makes them Angels in my eyes.

Keep praying for the ministry on Tuesday nights. God has blessed us with helpers and we need to continue to pray for resources both food and money related. I struggle with using paper products sometimes because of the cost and not being able to reuse them, but it seems the only viable option for us right now.
Another thing is the numbers we're seeing. It's getting larger. And part of it is the neighborhood walkups we're getting. People who live in the neighborhood and come up to take advantage of a free meal.
Since the first night we've started, we've never said you had to be home less or be staying in the Mercy House, but when we see people pull up in cars and ask what're we serving tonight, it doesn't always sit right, if you know what I mean. I struggle with it at times.

But then I think about how God has blessed us. Without a board, without steering committees, or any of that stuff. Just people committed to doing something as basic as putting food in a needy person's hand. So I try to remember God sees into people's hearts, not me.

And I think about a Jaguar pulling up to the curb ......

Baseball blog up and running

There's ablog up for the baseball trip. The address is http://fbcbaseballtrip.blogspot.com/

Margaret Johnson says CHECK IT OUT!


g

The Olympic List

Here's a list. Take it or leave it.

1.Best Olympic event to watch on TV

2. Dumbest Olympic event

3. The event you pay attention to only during the Olympics

Me?
1. Gymnastics (the Bar events)
2. Synchronized swimming
3. Gymnastics, period.

and got out of the explaining business for the night.

All right.....5 trips down, one to go.



Got back Saturday night from the Guatemala trip. We had a blog for it -mailto:--mfbcguatemalatrip@blogspot.com. Check it our for a day by day posting from folks on the trip. I'll probably throw something on here later, too.



Continuing my "here a week, gone a week" attendance on Tuesday nights, last week was handled by the Friendship sunday school class, who did a great job. Both Twig and I were in Guatemala last week, so I really appreciate them being willing to step up and fill in the gap.

We had a good turnout of youth tonight. That's been the case all summer, so much that lately my biggest criteria for what we're gonna cook is whether or not it will get a lot of people involved for significant amounts of time. For example, instead of buying cole slaw, make cole slaw.

Tonight we made 2 different meals, partly for the above reason and partly because that's the way the resources for tonight dictated.
1st Stop - Spaghetti and garlic bread
2nd stop- Taco salad.
Desserts and sodas at each stop.

It was good and I had people busy all night in the kitchen....

Helping tonight
Ellen Henry J Boggs Johnny Pruden Worth Maggie Madison Robbie Rachel Danielle Zack Bryan Anna Caroline Phil Savannah Ashley Michael Lainey Samantha Tracy Emory
me

I'll be out next week. I leave for the baseball trip on Thursday morning.
Got 5 games in about 8 days. Washington,D.C., Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium. Fenway in Boston, and Philadelphia, but not in that order.
Gonna be fun. It'll be cool to go to Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium in their last year of existence. Be honest with you though.......I don't know why they're getting rid of Yankee Stadium. Shea I can understand. It's bad. But Yankee Stadium isn't.....

Something kinda sweet about last week was going to a village way off the main road and passing out bags of food and clothes. Saying it was way off the main road doesn't do it justice. Jayne said if she had seen the road we'd be driving on to get to the village, we might not have gone. Steep up, steep down, rutted, skinny, slick, long, blind curves, ... it had everything but a wooden bridge with a troll under it. But we went, and more than one person made the observation maybe that's why God doesn't tell us or show us the roads he wants us to travel to get to where he wants us to go sometimes, because if we knew or could see them, we wouldn't go.

What made the food and clothes night even better was the fact that we did it on a Tuesday Night! It was just like being back here except every one coming through the line was about 4 ft. tall and looked at me funny when I said "Dios de bendiga", which should be "God bless you" in Spanish. I hope it is. We passed out bags of food for 90 families. Last year we passed out food for 200 families. The reason for the difference this year is the rising cost of food. Food prices have gone up 61% since last summer in Guatemala and the average Guatemalan income hasn't risen any. The amount that bought enough for 200 a year ago only bought enough for 90 this year That made me sad.


We always design a t-shirt for mission trips and take a group picture in them and stuff like that. I go on a lot of trips and so, while I'm very appreciative and look forward to my t-shirt, I usually don't whip it out on the trip and rock it the day after I get it. Some people do and that's great for them. Except for this trip........

The shirt had a very simple front- just the word GUATEMALA on the front and a design on the back with the church's name and a picture of something. Nothing outrageous, but when John, the missionary, saw it he told us we couldn't wear them in Guatemala because people would get offended. Here's why - The word on the GUATEMALA on the front was in a bold, weathered font. and the G and the M were bigger than the other letters..like this " GuateMala ". For no particular reason, they just did it that way when they designed it. John explained that "Guate" is a short way of saying Guatemala and capitalizing the "M" made it a new word-"mala" which means "bad". So in essence our Mission Trip t-shirts said in big bold letters on the front "Guatemala. Bad."

I could see where they might take offense to that.

And think about it....malnourish, maladroit, malevolent......the prefix "mal-" means bad in the English language, too, so it makes sense.

I was trying to explain it to someone who wasn't grasping what John was saying. I tried to explain using Carlsbad Caverns as an example. Nothing wrong with a shirt saying "Carlsbad Caverns", but if I capitalized the "b" and and it said "Carls Bad Caverns", that gave it a different and worse connotation. I thought it was a pretty good example. They looked at me like I was speaking Greek backwards and then asked me if Carlsbad Caverns were in Guatemala.
That's when I said "smell you later".....
g


p.s. Just saw the hit counter and it said 1266. Whoo Hoo! Last time I looked this summer it was like 900- something. Sweet! I'm gonna find me an Orange Crush in a glass bottle and celebrate. gh