CHOCOLATE

We've been typically short of food for our Grace Care food pantry and soup kitchen for quite a few weeks now. Seems it's always this way in the summer.

So when we got the offer of picking up some quality supplies from our friends at the Lighthouse Mission this morning, I decided to take a run down there myself.

On the way I met up with one of the many colorful characters in our church, Big Jim, who had offered to help me. Jim has been part of our church family for three years or more now and the fact that he brews the Starbucks for our Big Screen Cafe on Sunday mornings arguably makes him one of the more important members of our team.

He's the same age as me, but our lives have gone along very different paths. Jim spent more than thirty years of his 57 in jail and we first met him not long after he had been released. That was when he came to our church, began a relationship with Jesus and got baptized. He's a great guy with a big heart and a wicked sense of humor. I enjoyed spending some time with him today.

We got a ton of good stuff from the Mission, but there were a few items we weren't immediately sure if we could use - like cases of dark cooking chocolate and 20lb boxes of crushed Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. After discussing it for a few moments we reckoned we knew someone who might appreciate baking materials and so dropped them off with Sarah who runs our Big Screen Cafe and has kept us fed and watered every Sunday throughout the past nine years.

She was in the middle of baking biscotti - loads of biscotti. Like a typical Italian mother, she wants to be sure we celebrate a special occasion (our first Sunday at Regal Cinemas) with good food. So she's baking and individually wrapping hundreds of these treats for Sunday. Thanks to our delivery, some of them will be chocolate dipped!

All this to say we have some great people. Very different and with different gifts, but God's best!