Encountering the local hunger problem has been life-altering for me.

So often when we hear “poverty” we don’t understand the world or its grinding nature. Many of us talk easily about sources of poverty, but we overlook the daily realities of it.

In my region part of that ugly reality is hungry kids.

It took a “perfect storm” for me to see it. After Deb’s death I was so sad. When the house voted not to allow the SNAP subsidy to lapse, I was driven quite literally to my knees in my living room. Not believing people to be worth of food knocked my pins out from under me.

I turned to my thinking team at church. I didn’t have an idea in my head, just pain. Scott, our church treasurer, got the hunger statistics. The rest of us were stunned. The crowd that had driven the Staten Island project batted around ideas. Most of them were far too grandiose. We knew we wanted this year (we thought!)’s project to be local. And now we knew we wanted it to be food. Last year we’d raised funds for the local food pantry. We knew we could do that again, and did. We started talking to other churches, finding out what they were doing, making a list.

And then we heard about the back-pack program. They’re all over the country, Love help us, because there is child hunger everywhere. Turns out, our local school district had just started a program. We talked about it in church, there was a huge outpouring of money. We had our purpose. We just needed to figure out where to step up so that we could do the most good.

This has turned into a huge project with a lot of pieces, few of which are in place yet. But huge projects take time. You’ll hear more from me, about what we’re doing, but in the meantime, you can help if you want to. Go here to read about this and to donate. There’s more information that will show up on the website soon… that’s one of those projects currently underway, but it’s a start.

Sorry, I tried to write about St. Paddy’s day… but this got in the way… Feeding the hungry is concrete Peacemaking. Please join us.