10 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TUESDAY NIGHTS

1. We have been serving meals every Tuesday since the fall of '03
2. If you come help, we'll let you wear an apron.
3. We've served over 17,000 meals since we started in '03
4. If there's leftovers, we fix ourselves a plate!
5. You don't need to be an expert at anything (especially cooking) to come join us.
6. No committee meetings. I repeat...NO COMMITTEE MEETINGS!
7. Some of the best prayers you'll ever hear come from the folks we serve.
8. He really does go by the name "Twig".
9. God does amazing things on Tuesday nights.
10. Very few things bless you as much as handing a plate of food to a hungry person.

.....I hope they realize the blessing they were to others and the one they were recieving

Good night tonight! The weather was breezy and cool, which is great for us and it is way better than the humid nights we were having for a while, but it may not be the best for our friends who are sleeping outside, so, I hope they stay warm tonight and other nights, too.
We had hot dogs at the first stop and some killer barbecue sandwiches at the 2nd stop.

It's funny the things you notice over time. In with the hot dogs we had tonight, we also had some hot sausages, the big red kind. And it never fails, once somebody notices that we have some of those, the others start asking for them specifically.

"Hey, got any more sausages?"
"Give me one of those sausages."
"I think I want one of them sausages."
And whoever's serving them that night always notices and mentions it to me. They love sausages. But I don't blame them. I'd want one of them too.

Peyson Hunt was killing me tonight. We heated up a couple of pans of Baked Ziti from last week and served as seconds at the second stop. Except Peyson kept calling it Zanguini.
He started at 7:15 and kept on til 9:30. We kept telling him it was baked ziti and he kept saying oh yeah oh yeah and then 5 minutes later he'd ask someone if they wanted Zanguini.
And to top that off, he kept calling the cole slaw relish.
So he's at the front of the line asking folks if they wanted Zanguini or Barbecue sandwiches with relish. Me and Chris Armstrong were about to send him down to dessert duty. Peyson's a hoot. I'm glad he came tonight.

Speaking of who came tonight:
Twig Ellen John Liverman Creeeeech Morgan Alexandra Zack Katie Liz Jon Hill J. Boggs Nick Michael Crystal Tiersa Alana Anne Alana's Sister Anna Bryan Teresa Pruden Craig Dave Chris Haley Leslie Candace me

Big News
Craig has a goatee now. I'll explain later, but trust me, it's big news.

Working on something to post tomorrow so I'm gonna hit the road for now.

Tonight really was a great night and for more than just the weather. It was cool to watch so many people interacting to do the things we needed to do tonight. As the night went on......

More to come......

This'll be quick...

Tonight was a great meal. Amy Long was making baked ziti for the Interfaith Family tonight and volunteered to make us some too. So we had 10 pans of baked ziti waiting for us to pop in the oven when we got down there tonight. It was awesome.

Lots of good folks working tonight;
Crystal Elana Tiersa Emory Katherine Creeeeeeeech Alexandra Liz Tyson His friend (sorry) Twig Chris Anna Morgan Bryan Randy Robin Katie Nick Michael Laura me

We brought folks inside tonight because it was raining lightly at the first
stop, but by the time we were leaving for the 2nd stop, it was clear. Very thankful for that.

Chris Armstrong and Morgan Campbell are both doing Sr. Projects with Homeless themes. Be on the lookout for clothes and food drives. Any help would be appreciated.

I'll try to get back on tomorrow with more about tonight.

Be good til then.

Prayer Request

If you read this regularly, you see the name Teresa Bland almost every week. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how she and two others do a lot of the washing and cleaning that frees the rest of us up for other things.

Teresa suffered a tragic loss in her family late last week. Her brother was killed in a fire. Please pray for her and her family as they deal with they with the loss of a loved one.
g

....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......
g

...I think we'll just stick with the candy.

I'll admit that tonight was one of the more offbeat menus we've offered but I figured they'd like it. We served Tomato sandwiches and butterbeans. That's right......Tomato sandwiches and butterbeans.
A couple of guys said they couldn't eat tomatoes because of the acid, so we had some ham and cheese as backup for them.

Why Tomato sandwiches?

Because I rode out to Billy Vaughn's house Saturday, and on the way out I asked him what was for lunch. He said tomato sandwiches, if you stop and pick up some tomatoes. So I did and that was lunch. Actually, we put bologna and cheese on our tomato sandwiches. It's an acquired taste. ( Besides, if you go to Billy's on a Saturday, it's gonna be Tomato sandwiches or Bacon and Egg sandwiches at some point in the day.)
Later, I was telling Twig about it and we decided we could do Tomato sandwiches one night and add something to it.....like beans. Then we said what about this Tuesday?

He soaked the beans overnight and added country ham and stuff, so they were a pretty souped-up version (pun intended). We sliced two boxes of tomatoes and rounded up a lot of mayonnaise and black pepper. We also baked two tubs of chocolate chip cookies.
Pretty basic and simple. Very good, though.

We got a bunch of "Man, I haven't had one of these in years" and "My mom used to fix these". Most of them really seemed to enjoy them.

Then again, maybe most of them were just being kind. Either way, I'll take it.

Here's my recipe for a Tomato sandwich:
Put 2 big slices of tomato on a slice of bread and put a lot of black pepper on the tomato. Put a lot of mayonnaise on the other slice of bread and slap'em together. Enjoy!
It helps to make lots of "mmmmmm's" and "nnhh nnnhhh nnnnhhhh's" while you eat it

Along for the Great Tomato Sandwich Experiment tonight was:
Ellen John Jon Hill Jon Boggs Twig Jane Anna Teresa Bryan Morgan Campbell Candace Eric Tracy Trina Laura Michael me

Bryan Campbell's daughter Morgan is going to do her Sr. Project on the Homeless and was here tonight helping. I agreed to be her Mentor.
Yeah.
Because the first thing you think of when you think of me is "Mentor".
'Tor"-mentor , maybe.

I'm a little late with these but...Eric and Candace are engaged. And Twig and Jane are engaged. Congratulations to them.
Talk about different approaches to it....One couple is getting married in St. Thomas, down in the Virgin Islands (insert your own joke here) and the other is getting married in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. You can ask them yourselves to see who's going where.

This Sunday night is the Business conference where all the Missions trip from the summer will report, and before that the gym will be set up with different Ministries that FBC members serve in or FBC supports.
Guess who's gonna be there, sitting at a table, with some pictures slapped up on a trifold, answering questions about what we do on Tuesday Nights?

SPECIAL DEAL FOR BLOG READERS!
If you come to the table and say "VERDANA", I'll give you a piece of candy. BUT....don't tell anyone else to do it or it won't be special for blog readers (and I might run out of candy). It'll just be our little blog secret.
PLUS... I'll give you another piece if you can tell me what "VERDANA"is.

I thought about giving away $200 gas cards, but everybody's doing that, so...... g

...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 ......