Gift for Hunger Awareness Day

As hopefully you are aware, our leadership made the decision to designate last sunday's Benevolence Offering to the SLO County Foodbank's Hunger Awareness Day project.

Their goal is to see the citizen's of SLO County each give one dollar on one day, June 10th.

I posted right here at Life Together about Hunger Awareness Day last year around this time. This year, Jill Talley, directed Maggie Cox our way from the public relations firm, Barnett, Cox and Associates who was spearheading the promo efforts for Hunger Awareness Day.

Maggie and I started chatting via email about 6 weeks ago and I expressed our desire to be involved at some level. Our staff and Financial Trustees came up with the Benevolence Offering idea as a great follow-up to our recent Serve Day. I thought we'd do better than "one dollar" for each of our congregation (I was right!). I didn't tell Maggie what we planned to do.

So last Sunday we made the announcement about the offering designation. Our average monthly benevolence offering is around $2,000. This last Sundays offering was just over $2900! The need and idea obvioulsy resonated with the family of Grace. It was so close, we just decided to round the gift to $3000.

I had the pleasure of emailing Maggie on Monday to share the news. She was floored. I thought her response would encourage your hearts on this Thursday. . . .

WOW!!!!!!!! You and your congregation have just blown us away. Many, many thanks!

Carl Hansen (Food Bank) and I are doing a presentation on Hunger Awareness Day at the Chamber breakfast this Thursday. Since the event is at Grace, I thought it would be fun to announce the donation and surprise Carl with the check as part of my remarks—we can give Grace a public thank you in its own venue, and make a point about the power of giving. Can really help build momentum. Does that sound ok? Possible to get the check by Thursday a.m.? We can pick it up.Thank you so very much.

So that's what happned this morning at the Chamber Breakfast, Good Morning SLO. Maggie just kept thanking us. She said she hoped that we might contribute "a few hundred dollars."

Such a pleasure! Such a blessing to me! One more small way we're striving to be "a church in the community, serving the community." I threw this need and opportunity out to my fellow pastors in the Central Coast Evangelical Pastor's Network. I hope a few other churches jump on board.

Thanks for your generous giving to the work of God through Grace.