After volunteering at The Dream Center for a few years, one outreach that I have been able to go out with several times is the Food Truck ministry. This ministry brings food to various neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles. The site that I went to recently was Ramona Gardens, which is a housing project in East L.A.
A short-term missions team from Pennsylvania came out as well, helping to prepare bags of groceries for the Ramona Gardens residents and playing with the kids in the week-away-from-summer sun. Carrots, tomatoes, mozzarella, yogurt and packages of frozen beef patties were stocked into plastic shopping bags, which was enough food to get each family and individual through the week.
On average, a person would pay about $30 for all of that food, but not a single person had to pull out their wallets, because everything that they received was free of charge. I do not totally understand the circumstances that most of these people are in, but I know that the economy has been extremely difficult for people, particularly those living in Los Angeles. When people give to The Dream Center, those gifts are used towards the community, and people are abundantly blessed.
Speaking of abundantly blessed, one thing that I noticed about several of the people waiting in line to receive food was that they held empty buckets. Not large buckets, but ones that could barely hold one normal-sized grocery bag of food. I had never seen that at a food truck site. Most people come prepared with big boxes and shopping carts and baskets to put their food in; however, these bucket people seemed to say, in a nonverbal way, that they did not expect to receive much.
Their buckets overflowed. They could have brought larger containers, but from my perspective, it gave the appearance that they had actually received more than the others because the emptiness that they came with was filled to capacity. When we bring the little that we have to God, He can use that and fill up our buckets to overflowing, too.
- Shameka
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