God Is Not Poor

Take a moment and look around you. The trees are leafed out in the most awesome shades of green, flowers are blooming, the sun is shining in the beautiful blue sky with white puffy clouds floating by. All of this brought to you, courtesy of the God of heaven and earth. God is a spiritual person not a physical person and He created everything and gave it to us, you and me. Do you have food on your table? Are you able to see, hear, taste. God has blessed you then. He has blessed you to be a blessing. God created enough of everything for everyone. It was His plan, given to us a long time ago.

He gives us everything, He asks that we give Him our time, our talents, our presence, and ten percent of all the things He gave to us. One, because it is good for us to know that we are still alright if we have ten percent less than we did a while ago. Two, because it is not good for us to hold tightly to material things. Three, we need to learn to trust Him in all things. Four, it is His way of providing for all of His people.

God's love is like a river flowing through all mankind. He gives to one, who gives back ten percent, which combines with others ten percents and makes it possible to do His work in another, who gives back ten percent to help another. When the system is working correctly there is enough to go around for everyone. Goods and services flow surely and confidently from one to another and goes on forever, a mighty flowing river. That is God's way. We wouldn't need government involvement if we would just do our part.

We need to quit stopping up the river. We build dams to try to keep the blessings all to ourselves which means someone else loses out on a blessing, and they are hurting and unsure if God is able to take care of them, and then they don't think they have enough to give to help someone else. God is spiritual, He shows us how it is supposed to work but He needs our help in the physical world.

This is a spiritual law, when obeyed, you are blessed and the blessing continues. When not obeyed, things start to deteriorate around you. It is not a hard concept, we can help to be the hands and feet of God blessing others so they also can be a blessing. We need to just follow the law and there will be enough for everyone.

Update on Breakfasts

Well, we are still excited about our breakfasts and there are many people who volunteer on a regular basis. We have been especially blessed that Tennessee Pride has been supplying us with sausage and sausage gravy. We have five different menus that we are using depending on what Sunday of the month it is.

I would love to tell you that there are tons of people coming but that isn't exactly true. We do have some regulars though. Freddie is homeless, has two braids like Willy Nelson, and rides a bicycle. Sometimes he can get work and he is here as long as he is not working. He was in the service and spent his time in Alaska and the Arctic. He says he learned a lot about survival while he was stationed there. He is very pleasant and always glad to see you. He often comes early and will help set up tables and chairs. He says he doesn't have a watch so he doesn't know what time it is.

One woman, Helen came, ate breakfast, went to Sunday School and church for several Sundays and now wants to join the church, she has become a regular

We have one couple that come fairly regular and they wrote the nicest letter:

Paster John Carpenter, it was a pleasure and wonderful experience to fellowship with you. My husband and I are very thankful for the blessing to be able to have breakfast and something to eat. It has been very hard for us since my husband was laidoff and with the economy being in such a situation now, he has not been able to find work. In our hearts I know the lord will bless us, as he has provided for us to come to your church and eat, sit and talk with you all. I thank God for the experience to fellowship with his children. Mr. Kevin and Rondalin Washington. See you soon.
Please remember us in your prayers.

We have another couple Chris and Marna who come every week. They are staying in an inexpensive hotel up the street, so they walk. Marna is deaf but Chris wants her to practice reading lips so we will speak slowly and she generally gets what we are saying. Often they volunter to take any left over food with them.

Richard lives in his truck and he comes every week but doesn't say much. Even if you try and talk to him. Generally he comes early and cleans his truck out using our dumpster before he comes in. Then he goes and cleans up in the restroom before he eats.

Mary comes for breakfast and stays for church, she has long white hair that goes down to her waist. We have been helping her with food from the food pantry and we have also met her daughter who lives with her.

Cliff has been coming to our church to get food and magazines for a long time. He has started to come to the breakfasts as well. Although he is generally pleasant, you can tell he is a little mixed up in his mind.

So, these are the people that God sent for us to minister to. We are getting to know them better all the time and taking care of their physical needs.

The Sign

In our ongoing desire to be a presence in the local neighborhood we decided to invite the community to our Easter services. About a block from our church, right by the Briley parkway ramps, is a large electronic billboard. We decided we could put our ad up there for the days before Easter. We signed on for Wednesday through Saturday but they started running our ad on Monday morning. It runs for ten seconds and there are two other ads that run for ten seconds each, so our ad comes on every twenty seconds and even if you don't see it the first time, it will be back on soon.

Speaking of signs, we also wrote our large lawn sign for our Easter egg hunt in Spanish as well as English. We have learned that a large portion of our neighborhood is Hispanic and we want to try and reach out to them.

Stories from "Room in the Inn"

"Room in the Inn" is a program here in Nashville for the homeless. It runs from November to March and it gives homeless people an opportunity to sleep in churches during the winter months when it is the coldest. Each church who signs up takes one night during the week that they send their church van downtown to the center for human resources to pick up men, women, or a combination of both. You can tell them how many your church can handle.

When they get to your church you feed them a meal, they may watch TV, and then they sleep on cots, or mattresses on the floor. They get up very early in the morning and are fed breakfast and then they receive a sack lunch for the day. They are supposed to be back at the center by 6:30 am. Some of the men have jobs and many of them are doing classes and such at the center. Many churches, like ours, have pre-school programs and the programs are very strict about not having strangers around the children so that is another reason for taking them back so early.

Our church takes six men every Wednesday night. They come for our Wednesday night meal and join in our study that we are doing afterward. It is pretty informal, just sitting around the tables and most of them seem to enjoy it and participate with us. Then they go upstairs when choir practice is starting. They watch TV, a movie, or many of them just want to go to sleep. We do not have showers at our church but many of the other churches do. We provide clean towels and washcloths, toothbrushes and toothpaste so they can clean up. Two of the men from our church stay with them for the night. This takes a lot of volunteers, van drivers, inn keepers, people to do laundry, people to set up the beds and take them down, cooks for Wednesday night, someone to bring breakfast and someone to bring lunches. We also have "undie Sundays" where we collect new underwear, undershirts, gloves, and socks to give the men and we keep some used clothing, sweatshirts, coats, and jackets in one of the rooms.

Back in November when the men first started coming there was one man named John who came for the first few weeks. Skip knew him from another year when Arlington had done Room in the Inn. Mike and I sat with him one evening and he was talking about his days in the army when he was a helicopter pilot. He said when he was in Korea, he only flew injured men to the hospitals but in Viet Nam he went on missions. He said the highlight of his military career was when he flew President Johnson's wife and girls if they needed to go somewhere in a helicopter. He was disappointed that he never got to fly the president though. He came for a few weeks and then he didn't come for two weeks. When he came back he said he had been diagnosed with lung cancer and had started taking Chemo on Monday. I felt so bad for him but he said that he'd had a good life and when your time was up, it was up. He never came back. I hope he had someone taking care of him when he was so ill.

In order to go out to one of the churches you have to get a ticket from the center. They give them out in the morning. You can not receive a ticket if you are drinking, doing drugs, argumentative, or belligerent. Some nights there are fewer churches taking men in and some nights there are more churches, so sometimes it is hard to get a ticket. One night a man came in and he was so hungry, he said he had a ticket for the night before but a woman had just gotten out of the hospital so he let her have his ticket and slept outside. He said that she needed it more than he did. I guess I had never thought about what happens to someone who is homeless if they have to have surgery or spend time in a hospital. But they are just as weak as you or I would be.

One of the men had been a worship leader at his church and when he talked about passionate worship it sounded like something I would like to participate in. It was so obvious that he loved the Lord and that all of us should let Him know that we loved Him, also.

There was this one guy who was from Montana. He was kind of quiet to begin with until he said he was from Montana. Well, Mike is from Montana so they spent the meal talking about different towns in Montana and hit it off quite well. When he went to leave he reached into his pocket and took out a small petit point cross and gave it to Mike. He said he always carried it in his pocket and asked Mike to keep it in his pocket. Even with so little he still wanted to give. It is so beautiful. This was truly extravagant generosity.

During our Bible studies the men often added insight that was spoken from the heart. Many had been taught in churches wherever they were from. It was obvious that they spent time thinking about God and pondering His plan for their lives. Some of these men are homeless by choice. Some just by bad fortune. Many of them have served their country in the military. It is not easy for them and they are grateful for the food given to them and a safe warm place to sleep at night.

Second Sunday

Well, I wish I could say that mobs of people showed up for breakfast on Sunday but really only one family did and they were an hour late because they forgot about the time change. We had people come out to prepare the breakfast and it was great for Mike to spend some time with them, getting to know them better. God is working all the time even when it seems like he isn't. We all need to remember to hold one another up in prayer and that sometimes we just need to be friends. If Jesus was here He would be our friend and hang out, help fix breakfast, and love us.

Kindness to our Neighbors

The third part of our plan is to bring donuts and coffee to teachers (during inservice), firemen, and police officers. Roger is in charge of this part of our effort and he has brought donuts to a local school for inservice during President's Day. They were well received and the principal was very excited.

The donuts and coffee also includes a letter to let the teachers know that we have a food pantry at the church and that we are offering free breakfasts on Sunday morning. Part of our thought in this process is that these kind of people know those who are hungry in our area. It is safe to say that most of the children in our area receive free breakfasts and lunches while they are at school since there family income qualifies them for the program. Our hope is that if any of these three groups run into someone they know is hungry they can give them our name and tell them how to find us. We also fear that children receiving free breakfasts and lunches during the week may not have food to eat on weekends.

Meeting New People in the Neighborhood

The second part of our plan is to go out and meet new people in our neighborhood. To find these people Jennifer and I found a company that identifies new people in whatever radius you give them from the church, they send them a oversized postcard inviting them to our church and then they e-mail us the names and addresses. Actually they found us, when we were trying to figure out how to do this. Isn't that the way God works. They send out to different new people each month.
Our goal is to take each of them a sack, the sack will have a sticker on the outside with our church info and microwave popcorn in it that says, "Pop in on us." We hope to take these out, meet them, and pray with them if they need prayer on Sunday afternoons. The sack will also have information on our church in it.
We are not sure how this will work, and since I said in the beginning we don't have money, we have set it up so that we get the fifty closest people to the church. The expense is nominal, a set up fee and a fee for each card. We have done all the initial set-up and are in the proofing stage of it. Our first mailing will be in April.
We have a month to recruit volunteers to do the visiting part.