February 20. The Bethlehem youth participated in the 30 Hour Famine this weekend. Starting after lunch on Friday, they didn't eat anything for 30 hours. Along with the usual youth group games, the kids also spend a lot of time serving and learning about hunger, both local and global.
So today I worked with the kids to sort food and stock the food shelf at CES, which gives out 50,000+ pounds of food each month in addition to many other amazing services for the local community. I definitely want to volunteer there again. Then we took the group to Feed My Starving Children where we packed 85 boxes worth of meals, enough to feed 50 kids for an entire year. While I generally lean toward sending money to aid organizations who will spend it in a local economy rather than shipping items from here to another place, the hands-on work definitely connected with the kids and helped them understand another dimension of hunger.
The evening wrapped with a celebration dinner after the kids broke the fast with worship/communion. I worked alongside a group of young adults and parents--and it was possibly one of the shortest mealtimes I've ever witnessed!