Giving Means so much

This is a picture of the 3 Thanksgiving Dinners I decided to randomly donate to 3 random families I selected after placing an ad on freecycle.

Every 3rd Saturday of the month our church holds a good sized food bank and anyone can take the food for themselves or for others. But I got to thinking, why can't I just help someone? Then I saw an ad on Craigslist where someone had written about how they wanted to bless someone with a dinner and email them her story. So I figured I would do the same thing, but on a smaller scale with Freecycle.

So I wrote up my ad which looked like this and waited for the stories to come in. I was sort of scared to see what sort of stories I would get because I was only one person and well, there are some people with a lot of needs out there!

I got about 9 responses. A couple were stretching it and a few didn't have a lot of details, but the ones who had a lot of details I spent more time debating on giving too. One of the responses was from a lady we had already helped over the summer ironically enough.

I narrowed it down to 3 in the end after convincing J that we could bless just one more family. We emailed them back and said we'd like to bless you and then went shopping. We tried to get them as much as we could but included the usual things someone would use: turkey, turkey pan (disposable one I know I know...) stuffing, pumpkin pie mix, evaporated milk for the pumpkin pie, potatoes or mashed potatoes, canned veggies, tin foil ( I know I know don't hassle me!) and so on.

reading the stories were a little heartbreaking, but it made it worth it to know what people truly needed and why. It was easy to give them the stuff and I hope they pay it forward one day when they can help.

Noah came along and I think he got it when he saw how grateful they were for the turkey dinner. I don't think it totally clicked, but he's getting there.

Give this season.

Its so worth it.

Even if you have to give silently, just give.

It makes your life feel 10x fuller!