Recently, the Schaefer’s and I embarked on a journey to fill up our church’s stake bed truck with food to refill our pantry on North Campus. I drove the stake bed while the Schaefer’s followed behind in their truck (social distancing of course) and we were off! When we arrived at Second Harvest Food Bank they generously filled the truck with three full pallets of canned goods, lettuce, bananas, chicken, and 75 milk cartons. With a full load of food, we headed back to the church and stopped along the way at the Pathways of Hope Food Bank to drop off and share our good fortune of milk. When we returned to North Campus, we unloaded the food into our food storage room with the help of two other volunteers.

The story is simple. We picked up food, shared it along the way, and unloaded it. It’s a small, but wonderful picture of the church coming together as Jesus’s hands and feet. The mission on this particular day was to fill up our pantry, but the mission of packing up groceries and distributing those groceries around our neighborhood to those in need is a team effort. I drove the stake bed, others helped load and unload, people will organize the very full pantry of food, others will bag up the groceries, others will have to distribute and drop off those groceries. The church is better together and even when we cannot be together, even when we have to wear gloves, masks and do these tasks in very small groups, we are all working together. Like any team, we each get to play our own part, big or small. In our homes or at grocery drop-offs we all have our part in this mission. I’m proud of our church. I’m proud of our response to love our community, and I am proud to be a part of this team no matter how very small my part in the bigger mission to love our neighbors is. Go, Team!

Stephanie Tanquary