Day #15!!!

I am very excited about today. I got to bring something to pass that my family and I have been prepping for since August. As a result of an inspirational talk given by a manager at the Utah Food Bank my family and I began saving the change we'd receive at the store. This change would go towards buying turkeys to donate to the Food Bank for Thanksgiving. Our motto was "One coin at a time... one turkey at a time... one family at a time."

We put all of our nickels and dimes in a jar and little by little it began to grow. In my visions of how this would go I saw us eventually filling the old jam jar to overflowing and moving on to fill a big 2 liter juice bottle. We DID fill the jam jar to overflowing but, that's as far as it went. There were plenty of quarters in there so I knew we'd have at least enough for one turkey, but I wasn't sure how much more. I asked around and found out that Turkeys ran anywhere from $15 to $30 dollars. My heart sank as I thought we probably only had saved enough for one turkey. This saving wasn't easy. The age of debit cards and credit cards makes it easy to never have to carry cash, so I made the conscious effort to get cash back as much as possible in order to have change to contribute to our "turkey jar."

The holidays have really crept up on me and before I knew it, it was Thanksgiving and our coins still sat in the jar... with no turkeys given to families in need. Thankfully Christmas is still a time for turkeys so we had another chance to put our coins to good use. And thankfully the Food Bank is still accepting turkeys. I took the jar to the credit union and was so surprised to see that over $40 was in there!! I quickly ran to the store and was so excited to see that I could buy THREE turkeys for all the change we had saved.

I love service. What is it about serving that brings such happiness? It's wonderful. As I drove up the ramp at the Food Bank toward the volunteers who stood ready to unload my car I was almost giddy. I drove away thinking of three more families who can enjoy a turkey dinner for Christmas. Thanks for your work, fam!

Let us keep those families who are going without so much in our prayers. And let us look for ways to help them.
In the words of tiny Tim, "God bless us. Every one!"