Ministry Day at Church

Every once in a while, I come up with a "brilliant" idea.  One of those ideas popped into my head a couple of weeks ago.  Several schools in the area had food drives over Nov./Dec. and our church was the recepient of the 1000's of cans.  The church had been alerted there were about 6000 cans of food coming for our food pantry. I'm not sure there are 6000 but there were 3-4 thousand.  So my brilliant idea was, the kids and I would go organize the food and restock the food pantry.  We got Emmalyn & Jonathan to join us and then Shay, Ryan and Tyler.  It was still a brilliant idea for the first several hours ~ the brilliance faded after about 3 1/2 hours.  But the good Lord gave us the stamina, laughter, jokes, and strength to finish the job.  

Amy, Emmalyn and I completely sorted and rearranged all the shelves.  Putting all the green beans together, sweet corn, creamed corn, spam, canned chili, etc.  2 shelves aren't completely sorted ~ the black eye peas, crowder peas, kidney beans, & the like are all mixed up.  Another varied shelf is the soup~we did seperate out the spaghettios, canned ravoili, etc.  After all the rearranging was done, all the sorters started bringing us boxes to restock.  Our dear sorters also checked all the expiration dates on the cans, we ended up with several hundred that were out of date ~ some by several years.  We don't need canned vegetables, soups, tomato products, fruit, stuffing mix for a long, long time.  And we still have a Sunday School room with over 1000 cans in it.  They are sorted by peas, beans, corn, soup, etc.  I don't know what will happen with them.

We laughed so much our sides and stomachs hurt.  Our backs were sore from lifting and toting.  Our friendships were strengthened.  I am very thankful for Christian young adults for my children to have good clean fun with.  And also for their willingness to "help" with my brilliant idea!  They hung with the program and got the job completely done in about 6 hours ~ that includes cleaning up all the garbage, rearranging the shelves, throwing away the expired cans, and lunch at Wendy's!

Here are a few pics of our "fun"...

1/2 of the donations

When 4 teenage boys are "in charge" you get cities made of cans!

Thank you Vanna!

sorted & stocked

1/2 of After ~ sorted and stacked (stuff that won't fit in the food pantry)