Hands of Hope

Every year our church does a church-wide Bible/book study, and each week, the pastor's sermon ties in with the lesson. This year's "Full Service in a Self-Service World" is a little different! Instead of holding the normal weekend services this week, the congregation was sent out to serve others in the Hands of Hope service projects!

Here are some of the projects from which to choose:

• Helping local schools with landscaping, litter pickups, mulching, painting, etc...
• Assisting various human service agencies such as the Salvation Army Soup Kitchen, Salvation Army Thrift Store, American Red Cross, Wake Interfaith Hospitality, Society of St. Andrews, an assisted living home, New Bern House, and more.
• Packaging 100,000 meals for Stop Hunger Now to send to those in need in Africa and Haiti.

The Schmidt family chose to glean with the Society of St. Andrew. We were sent to a field in Louisberg, NC to harvest collards and cabbages. Since it was over an hour away, we were off to an early start for a Saturday morning. It is quite a chore to get 6 people adequately adorned to work in a cold, wet, dirty field, but somehow, we made it out of here on time!

We smartly put latex gloves over our cheap Dollar Tree gardening gloves, William and I were given sharp weapons, and we were sent out into a field to harvest the collards and cabbage. With Benaiah on my back and what looked like a little linoleum knife, I quickly realized that I was ill-equipped to harvest the collards. So, I crawled down the row cutting cabbages and peeling the icky leaves off so that they looked like what you would buy at the store. William harvested was a harvesting machine doing both collards and cabbages with his little saw. Jeremy did a great job hauling 8-9 cabbages at a time to the Inter-faith Food Shuttle's truck. Marissa enjoyed pulling the nasty leaves off of the collards and bagging them, Annika was in charge of the cabbage bag and peeled a few of them, and Benaiah got himself into a position on my back where he could see over my shoulder and give me editorial comments like, "EWWwwwww! Dat distustin', Mommy." Near the end, he started asking to watch "Yo Gabba Gabba" and "Barney."

We harvested for 2 hours, and as we were walking off of the field, the kids asked about doing it again!

We joined some other families from church at Bojangle's for lunch -our reward.

Sadly, we forgot the camera because I'm sure that the photos would have been great entertainment for many! These are collards. The field in which we worked had sand in between the rows, and the cabbages and collards were inter-mixed.

It is so cool to know that within 48 hours of our family project, people in need are eating the cabbages and collards that we picked!

Jeremy went back to church that evening to join his middle school small group in packaging meals for Stop Hunger Now. He said that was fun too.

When can we do it again?