It's a nice gesture, but truly serving the poor should require more of us than one Saturday a year.
For the years I was in Bible College the highlight of the holiday season was the day my church put together food boxes for the less fortunate in our area. One of the benefits of being a megachurch is access to mega-resources, and my church spared no expense when it came to giving out holiday food. Hundreds of volunteers from the church would show up to assemble gigantic boxes filled with every imaginable food stuff: whole turkeys, roasting pans, gallons of milk, bags of fresh apples, onions, potatoes and carrots, and whole pumpkin pies from Costco. The boxes we put together rivaled much of my own family's traditional feast, and it made me proud to know we were giving the best to those who needed it most.
For years, other like minded-volunteers and I would cram our cars with several food boxes and set off to deliver them to different parts of the city. The boxes would go to neighborhoods I rarely found myself in, given to families who either didn't speak the same language as I or who were simply too exhausted to try. Most of the deliveries left me with a heartwarming moment—carrying in all the food, watching the eyes of the children grow wide as they stared at the huge assortment, merrily shouting, “God bless you!” as I left. Other experiences weren't quite as positive, like the single mom who screamed into her cell phone the entire time I lugged in food (it took several trips), barely registering I was there at all. For the most part, however, delivering the feast was one of my favorite holiday traditions.
For the past several years, I have started to rethink all the warm fuzzies I got from these experiences. What is a single Hispanic mom with no money to pay the electric bill going to do with several boxes of stuffing and cans of green beans? More importantly, I began to question the very nature of complete strangers delivering food to the poor one day out of the year.
What if I had a relationship with the single mom who seemed to be having a really rough day? What if I knew the story about the middle-aged shut-in who lived in the apartment complex specifically designated for drug addicts in recovery? What if I knew my neighbors well enough to be invited in for a cup of tea, instead of dropping off food like an underling for Santa Claus?
I realized that one of my main problems with Operation Food Box was the fact that many of the households we delivered to were addresses given to us by other aid organizations—very few of the families and individuals were known by members of the church. What does that say about a church if they have to outsource in order to find the poor and needy? For me, it meant there was a big enough disconnect between my desires (help the poor) and my reality (where are they?). I found that they were, indeed, all around us, and in order for myself to feel good about giving food, it needed to be more about the relationship with the people and less about having a "BIG outreach."
While food boxes definitely have their place in the modern Christian tradition of giving, I can't help but think an attitude of food sharing would be more beneficial. It would mean knowing our neighbors well enough that “the poor” is not a mere concept—and the “hungry and thirsty” aren’t an abstraction, they’re real people. Developing relationships and networking with organizations to empower families to never be hungry, regardless of the holiday season, is more in line with the teachings of
Jesus than delivering one goody-filled box.
In this new year let's actually change the way we live our lives. Let's begin to get involved in peoples lives. Even if it's just one person. Let's involve our lives in theirs and reach out to them with the Love of Christ year around instead of cramming all of this into one day or one month.
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