cup a joe

What a week. Three of the kids have been sick...with the forth one getting sick at the end. Cindy and I went to the doctors office yesterday with the entire crew. Since we had to change our insurance, going to the doctors has been a hassle. In our new plan, there are no doctors in the DeKalb metropolitan area. Because of that we have to drive into St Charles, some 30 miles away.

Cindy called the doctor yesterday morning because the kids were hacking up a lung. It did not sound good. The doctors office told us that if we wanted to get in, we would need to be there in 30 minutes (Do the math, office 30 miles away, kids & wife, not dressed...can't be done unless several laws are broken).

Well, 35 minutes later, we pull into the doctors office. After waiting 20 minutes or so to get in, we find out that all six of us have the flu...some worse then others. Then off to Target for the prescriptions. Lets see, $180 in co-pays latter everyone seems to be doing better. I find it interesting that this week I'm preaching on the second part of Luke 4...you know, casting out demons and casting out fevers. One would think that the Lord is giving me personal experience here.

We are taking a group of people through a building tomorrow. This building always seems to come up when ever we do our search. I have been through it twice, and it's not the perfect layout, but with a little creativity (ok, a lot of creativity), it might work. It seems that every time we start looking at this building seriously, something better or more glamorous comes up and distracts us. Those distractions have never worked out, and so, once again, we are back to this building. This also should be a test for the people that we are bringing through. The church will not jump out at you...you will have to literally look through walls to see it. I have never asked them to do that. It should be interesting.

Interesting article on food pantries...from the NY Times, via Jordon Cooper...


For years, public and nonprofit food assistance programs have been reporting a sharp rise in the number of working families using their services. But now, as working families are becoming as common visitors as the indigent elderly at the city's soup kitchens and food pantries, many program officials say an ambitious shift is under way in how food for the needy is delivered.
The conventional answer of a box full of donated canned fruit, rice and beans, and the odd piece of eggplant is being supplemented, and in some cases replaced with new options: complete premade meals for takeout, for example, or frozen family-size portions of chili and spaghetti sauce.
Driving the shift in strategy, experts and providers say, is a familiar social and economic phenomenon: the growing numbers of working poor turning up at the soup kitchens and pantries, in most cases single mothers with children, are so busy juggling jobs, commuting and child care that they have little time to cook the food they are given. "The face of poverty is a working woman with two children," said Robert Egger, the founder of D.C. Central Kitchen and an advocate for rethinking what goes into a charity food basket. The options most of the nation's poor have, he says, are to stand in line for a meal at a soup kitchen or to go to a local church to pick up a box of groceries assembled from donations.


Kinda makes you think about the set-up of a church pantry. Normally you would just have people donate cans of food...stuff that they probably don't want (of course, every person I know would just kill for that old can of Cranberry sauce that you have in your pantry from Thanksgiving, 1975!). Using the above model, people in the church would be cooking meals. That would require thought...hmmmm...interesting....