The Mission Day 1

This morning a handful of us set out from the church to Frederick, Maryland. It seemed like an unlikely place to be heading to serve meals to the homeless and recovering addicts, but away we went. After getting oriented with the facility (the former Frederick County Prison dating back to the late 1800's), we began stocking the pantry shelves with lots of baked items such as cakes, loaves of bread, pies, potato chips, and cookies. Almost every shelf was filled. There was so much food! This was going to be food that as those receiving meals would come in, they would be allowed to pick several items from the shelves to take with them as they left. I couldn't imagine that much of it would get taken, but we stocked them full just the same.

We began serving meals to the approximately 25 residents of the mission, and then we opened the doors to feed the homeless. The numbers were staggering. They kept coming and coming. They told us that there were between 150 to 200 people that came through! When it was all over, we walked down the pantry aisle that we had stocked so full and to our shock, discovered that it was vacant of most of the food we had just put on these shelves. I mean, they were bare!

We headed to the Mission's warehouse after lunch to help bag and sort clothes. We made our way through piles of clothes and were able to finish up all of the clothes that were there for that day. It gave our students a real sense of accomplishment to be able to finish out all of the clothes in there. To close the day we headed back to the mission and served dinner to the residents. Needless to say, our students were wiped out on the way home, but the experiences and conversations they had today were priceless. I can't wait to bring the new crew of students in the morning to allow them to experience it all over again! Keep praying for us this week!

Ron Foster