Food is a concern on the reservation. The basics of life are hard to come by at times.

Today I was short-staffed at the center. Mondays are always hard. Today it was only me. Thankfully, I stopped at the store yesterday. I had what I thought would be enough food for a couple of days. The day shelter opened a little late, but the people were hungry and needed food and coffee!

Normally we try to offer a hot meal to the visitors of the Day Shelter. Sometimes we just do not have the peoplepower to do so. So today it was sandwiches. I will admit we normally have bologna sandwiches. I could not do that again so, today the choice was turkey and cheese! I started at a little after 11, by noon I was out of the loaves of bread, 60 sandwiches were handed out. I ran across the street for more bread and started again.

But it is not just the homeless that are hungry.

Our Kid’s Time families are also facing hunger. We provide a hot meal to 130 kids each week. Yet this is not enough. We found that many of the kids do not have enough food at home. Particularly on the weekends. To counter this need we have begun providing gift cards to the families, good at the local grocery stores.

Whether the people we help are homeless or they are in a family, we try to show them that God loves them. Not with our words but with our actions. For as James tells us what good is it to tell someone to go and eat their fill is we are not willing to supply their bodily needs?