Kellie Lisi
The city of Lincoln, NE, where I completed my diaconal internship, has an extraordinary food ministry called Food Net. This is a program designed to keep food waste out of the trash and to get it into people’s homes where it can be used to feed and nourish.
It is an unbelievable experience, the presence of such abundance, an absolute plentitude gathered from Hy-Vee, Target, Trader Joe’s, Kroger, Walmart. Table after table covered in items the stores produced and did not sell. Rather than be thrown away, they are gathered here: free for anyone to pick-up and put in their bag and take home and use to feed themselves and their families.
Perhaps the most unbelievable thing about the Food Net distribution is that, as the last of the day’s crowd of people trickle through the line, there is still so much food that remains. There is a quantity of food that could easily feed 30 more people, and enough bread left for 100 more families. Yet, when the last person has completed their “shopping,” this is it. What remains will now be thrown away.
This happens every week throughout the city, at 15 distribution sites, each operating on a different schedule and in a different location for maximum accessibility. There is no income requirement, no identification verification, no proof of work or citizenship. The sites are adjacent to churches and community centers, daycares and shelters, businesses and government buildings.
There is such abundance. There truly is food for all. But how will it be received? How will ways of thinking be shifted, shame set aside, fears of scarcity disregarded, so that this gift may be recognized and received?
How can we come in this same way to God, hands open, ready to accept all that God has prepared? God calls you to come, calls you unto Godself that you may repent and thus be reoriented to God and God’s abundant love for all creation.
In repentance we open ourselves to the understanding that our ways are not the way of God, that our thoughts are not the thoughts of God. In repentance we are oriented again to our God who loves us, our God with whom there is always enough. In a world that focuses on scarcity and empty tables, God’s way is the tables full of food, with an abundance that remains even after each person has eaten their fill.
There is enough, if only we come.
Oh God of abundance, we do not come to you as we should. We hunger and thirst and we fall short of what you have prepared for us. We repent of our ways. Reorient us to you and to your love, that we may be filled and truly nourished by the power of the Holy Spirit through Christ Jesus. Amen.
