...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 ......