....how good all those drinks looked sitting on our new table!

No hand-wringing this week. I thought about meatball subs the minute I got up Monday morning and never looked back. The only real thing that required any thought was what to serve with it and we eventually went with homemade macaroni and cheese. A little dessert, some sweet tea and BANG! You got your meal right there, nothing to it.

We had quite a few sliced tomatoes left at the end of last week's tomato sandwich experiment and Anna volunteered to take them home and make marinara sauce for us. That's what we put our meatballs in to heat them up. She made a good sauce! (All right, confession time. Raise your hand if you made a tomato sandwich at home this week after reading the blog last week. 1,...2,..3,4,5....That's what I thought.)

Check this out:
Because of all the stocking up for the "hurricane" that was going on last week, the place I usually get our bread still had bare shelves! I had to buy three different types of rolls and even that wasn't enough. I stopped by Sam's and got a few more to be sure.

The kitchen was hopping tonight. We had a lot of folks and a lot of things to do. Helping out tonight was:
Ellen Emory Morgan Anna Caroline Teresa Bryan Anna T. Catherine Twig J.Boggs Jon Hill Liz Chamberlain Peyton Danielle Pruden Craig Bryan Clay Candace Eric John L. Ryan Kit Alexandra Creeeeeeeech me

A Little Table History:
Back when we started doing this at the Activity Center, we would load up 2 of those old 8 ft. brown folding tables that you see at every function to serve off of. Heavy as crap. The kind that would cut into your fingers when you picked them up on their side and took 2 people to move when they were folded up. We'd lug 'em downtown and lug 'em back every week. Then I got some money and decided to upgrade and bought some of those lightweight white ones from Sam's Club. Talk about a world of difference.
One person could carry it, the edges didn't splinter off into you....just nice to have. (I suggested we paint something on them just for kicks, something that would be kind of jarring to see as you were being served. Jim Morgan had the best and most appropriate idea- The Last Supper! How cool would that be! Which got me to thinking,... maybe we couldn't paint The Last Supper on the table, but what if you could buy tablecloths with it on there? And maybe other images like the Mona Lisa or the Empire State Building? What if you could get your photos printed on the tablecloths? Like for weddings or graduations. There's a niche business in there somewhere.) So we've been using the 2 lightweight tables for awhile now.

But I've been watching and thinking.

We used to serve sodas out of coolers that sat away from the tables, but now we do Tea and water every week. That's a cooler for tea, a cooler for ice, and a cooler for ice water. Plus the cups we pour it into. That's a lot of space that we don't have on the tables. At the first stop it's ok because we can serve it off of the bricks that surround the courtyard, but at the 2nd stop we've been using the tailgate of the truck to pour off of and then putting the filled cups on the end of of the table by the desserts. It works, but there's a better way. Last week I grabbed the oldest, most beat up table from downstairs and took it out with us to serve. Putting the drinks on it at both stops worked great but it felt like it weighed a million lbs. after using those lightweight ones.

So when someone came up to me at the Business meeting Sun. night and put some money in my hand, saying they'd gotten some extra in their paycheck last time and wanted to help us, I spent $43.86 of it right there in my head on a new lightweight 6 ft. table at Sam's. Done deal. I've been excited about buying it since then. I picked it up today. It's ridiculous how excited I was about breaking out a new table tonight. I'm such a dork sometimes.

Thanks to the family that gave us the money and made me so happy. They probably have no desire to be recognized here for that but I will tell you they pop up in the blog and on Tuesday nights regularly.

Gene McIntyre gave us some deer burger and fish this week. Gene hunts and last year was able to give a substantial amount of deer burger and sausage. Twig made a seriously good meatloaf with some of it. Thanks to Gene and Sue for thinking about us. The great thing about Gene, is that when he gives us stuff like that, it's already in a usable form. He gets it ground up into burger, or made into sausage. That's wonderful on our end. The less we have to do to it, the better.

I think we're going to tweak the fish fry idea next time and fry fish but make fish sandwiches with it. Just like McDonald's. Which reminds me... the best I can remember, I never saw my Mother order anything but a fish sandwich at McDonald's. Ever. Always a fish sandwich. And a small orange soda.

But I digress.

Tonight was good. We saw new faces and familiar friends. We shared prayer requests at the end. Twig has an uncle going into surgery tomorrow. Danielle is having her knee 'scoped tomorrow at 1:30 with hopes that it'll be ready for basketball season (the girl has serious skills), and Catherine mentioned a member of her S.S. class that had recently had a double transplant. We lifted up Praise for Jeannie Troutman's good news last week after going to Houston. And we prayed for the folks we see every week and asked God to watch over them and to provide for them while keeping them safe. Which is the same request we should lift up for ourselves.

So in closing, it was a great night. If you weren't there, I wished you could've been. You'd have seen good people doing a great thing for the Kingdom. You might've gotten a pretty good meatball sub at the end of the night. You would have recieved a blessing from doing the exact same thing Jesus did when he was on the earth. And you would have seen......
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