A Rookie’s Adventure in Food Bank Shopping
by Bob Zerrenner, RBC Food Bank volunteer
Recently, I volunteered for to pick up the groceries for the Food Pantry. As a newer volunteer, I thought it would be pretty simple: Drive up to the store, load up the groceries, return to the Food Pantry and unload. The term “shopping” never entered my mind (I personally don’t shop – especially not in stores.) I usually just make a list and search reviews to find the best price to buy. When I go in the store, I don’t meander the aisle thinking about the various products. If it’s not on my list, then I don’t buy it (unless it’s a dessert – then I may do some impulsive justification of why it should be on the list!)
Due to my schedule, I planned on making two trips to two different stores. I went to the first store that had the four products that we needed. I entered the store, got two carts, my binder with notes, our tax-exempt card (don’t forget to hand them that!), a lot of energy, and went to my first aisle to find the first item. I found the space on the shelf where the item was supposed to be …but, alas, no item. I thought I’d ask a friendly associate, but could find any associate at all, let alone a friendly one. Moving on to item two: I needed 200, but found only 30 on shelf. Make that question number two on my friendly associate request list. On to item number three: needed 100 items, but only 19 were on the shelf. Do you see a theme starting here? Move on to the last item where I needed only 4 items and – bingo! – I was able to find all four.
After a little while, I found three associates together in one aisle and figured that the odds were in my favor that at least one would be friendly. After a short conversation, I remembered why I don’t gamble – all three associates were not that helpful at all, even after explaining to them how to use their own inventory scanners to see if any of the products I was searching for were in the back room. Continuing on my search for a friendly associate, I finally found one who explained that a delivery truck was scheduled for that evening to bring the back-ordered items. I should check back tomorrow.
I left the store and actually was disappointed that my first shopping adventure was a disaster. I returned to the Food Pantry and started to unload the feeble amount of merchandise that I had purchased. As I opened the door to the pantry and saw the shelves – and how empty space was on them – I was instantly reminded how blessed I am. What if I needed assistance and I waited in line and got a bag or two of groceries? Would that be “enough” to feed my family of five? Who would I turn to for assistance? Would I be “happy” with the products provided, or would I want brand name products? Oh, how selfish, self-centered and sinful I am.
The next day, I went to our second store where I knew that a lot of items were waiting for me to pick up (we do an advance order with this particular store each week.) Upon arrival, I was greeted enthusiastically by the manager who proceeded to wheel out two u-trucks full of groceries. She was pleasant, and her whole team was helpful during the process. I loaded the car and realized that I may need a bigger car, but we were able to fit it all in there.
As I drove home that night and came home to a pantry full of stuff, I realized how blessed we truly are. How much do I take for granted that our pantry is filled? How do I react when my favorite chips, cookie or fruit is not at my fingertips? Do I react with a correct heart and mind? Or do I react out of a mindset that tells me I deserve to have this and now? There was a frustration within me that said, “Why can’t I just go out and buy the products and not worry about the cost? Couldn’t just we fill the pantry to the ceiling with food?” Yes we could… but that would be us working and not God working in this ministry. We may only be able to provide some small amount of food each week to the people who need it, but we are also building relationships with those people. We are telling them about eternal food available through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. While we can’t provide for every physical need, we can certainly provide for their spiritual need and point them to the place where the pantry is never empty.
VIDEO: Winston Smith on Marriage Matters
In this video, CCEF counselor Winston Smith discusses the premise of his book, Marriage Matters, which will be the basis of this year’s marriage conference.
Join us on May 4 and 5 at Reston Bible Church for our Spring Marriage Conference, featuring Winston Smith. Winston Smith, M.Div., is an author, counselor and faculty member at the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation(CCEF); he has extensive experience as a marriage and family counselor, and teaches seminary students how to counsel couples.
Winston will draw on his extensive experience as a marriage counselor, and share a simple yet powerful prescription for changing your marriage. He will show us how examining the everyday disappointments and irritations in your marriage will help you understand yourself, your spouse, and your need for God’s love. Interactions that used to devolve into pointless annoyances and fights can become an opportunity for God’s activity and love to become increasingly evident and powerful. These principles can take your marriage to extraordinary places and lead you into a deeper relationship with an extraordinary God. Don’t settle for an ordinary marriage; learn to live out God’s extraordinary love in your most intimate relationship.
GET INFO & REGISTER HERE
VIDEO: Paul Goodnight on Marriage Matters
Paul Goodnight, counseling pastor at Reston Bible Church, invites you to join us on May 4 and 5 for our Spring Marriage Conference, featuring CCEF speaker, counselor and author Winston Smith.
Details and registration info are at restonbible.org/marriage
Conversations 2012: That’s a Wrap
What do you get when you take 80 bakers, 50 coffee servers, 25 ushers, countless food preparers, children’s ministry volunteers, prayer warriors, 2 backstage crew, 38 actors, 7 band members, sound, lights and media volunteers, a director and 3 people willing to be transparent and share about the struggles in their lives and the victory they have found in trusting Christ with their circumstances? Conversations, that’s what you get! Conversations is an annual production including music, drama, humor and real life stories that takes place each evening the week before Easter. It is week where our church comes together to share with our families, friends, co-workers and neighbors the hope that we have in Jesus. This is real hope – hope not based on circumstances or happily-ever-afters, but on the truth of the word of God and His son, Jesus Christ.
Working behind the scenes, we have the privilege of seeing God at work during the entire process of putting Conversations together. The ministry that takes place among the cast and crew is amazing. People of all ages come together to do ministry, connections are made, prayers are answered, and we are each changed through our experience.
Hundreds of hours go into putting on a production like this – writing, rehearsing, building sets, designing graphics and coordinating all the many, many details. But even the most impressive production is worthless if the congregation doesn’t get behind it and do the most important part – invite and bring their unchurched friends and family. We named this event Conversations for two reasons. The music and scenes are based on conversations that go on around us all the time, and our hope is that you would continue to have conversations with the people you brought to see it.
If you have had a memorable conversation with one of your guests since bringing them to Conversations, we would love to praise with you and pray for you. To share a conversation or story that happened as a result of Conversations, please email us at stories@restonbible.org.
Thanks to RBCer Mike Kelly for the great photos. You can see his Conversations 2012 photo gallery here.
Also, since so many of you asked so nicely, below is The Elevator Scene:
VIDEO: Winston Smith on Healthy Marriages
Join us on May 4 and 5 at Reston Bible Church for our Spring Marriage Conference, featuring Winston Smith. Winston Smith, M.Div., is an author, counselor and faculty member at the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation (CCEF); he has extensive experience as a marriage and family counselor, and teaches seminary students how to counsel couples.
Winston will draw on his extensive experience as a marriage counselor, and share a simple yet powerful prescription for changing your marriage. He will show us how examining the everyday disappointments and irritations in your marriage will help you understand yourself, your spouse, and your need for God’s love. Interactions that used to devolve into pointless annoyances and fights can become an opportunity for God’s activity and love to become increasingly evident and powerful. These principles can take your marriage to extraordinary places and lead you into a deeper relationship with an extraordinary God. Don’t settle for an ordinary marriage; learn to live out God’s extraordinary love in your most intimate relationship.
GET INFO & REGISTER HERE
Marriage Struggling?
MARRIAGE STRUGGLING? HERE’S WHY.
1. When you were dating you thought to yourself, “When we get married, I will change him/her.” That introvert personality will come out of their shell. Those strange irritating habits will fall by the wayside. This is equivalent to believing a dog can teach a cat to bark. It won’t happen. One’s personality is not a sin. Sin lies in character, morals, ethics, and behavior but not in personality.
2. Heading down the aisle, you were quite sure the two of you were of one mind in thought and purpose – but time has proven otherwise. There was more of a distance between the two of you when you said “I do” than you could have ever imagined. That unknown distance is the unexplored territory that marriage reveals. All marriages are programmed to fail if this territory is not navigated with humility and wisdom. To neglect this piece of real estate is to run from responsibility.
3. Recognize that all your expectations before you got married were performance based. “If I can get him/her to change, then I will have a happy marriage.” When such expectations are not realized, the lingering weight of disappointment only exacerbates the situation.
4. Love is not based on what your spouse can do for you but what you can do for your spouse.
5. Proverbs 18:17 says, “Life and death are in the power of the tongue.” If this verse could be measured in speed, it would be lighting fast. If measured in power, it would be 500-horse power. If measured in bytes, it would be a million gigs. Tattoo this verse on the back of your eyelids and let it be the guide for your tongue all the days of your life. What you say to your spouse does not reveal their heart, but yours (Matt.12:34).
6. When the changes you were counting on didn’t happen, angry words are exchanged. Attacks and counter attacks become the norm. Both sides begin to retreat into their own private world of work, TV, video games, and endless hours of entertainment to deaden the pain. Emotional or legal divorce is soon to follow.
7. We can control what we eat, but we cannot control what we hear. We can remove what goes into our mouth but not what goes into the ear, which is the gateway to the soul. Once it is said, it cannot be retracted.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
1. It is never too late to get things back on track. It will take courage, time, energy, wise counsel, and most of all humility.
2. Take a hard look at your contribution to the demise of the marriage. Do not focus on your spouse’s failures. That is their responsibility, not yours
3. Once the two of you have taken careful inventory of your failure, you will need to seek forgiveness from the other. This is not just saying I’m sorry but looking your spouse in the eye and stating what you have done to damage the relationship and saying “Will you forgive me for…..?”
4. You will then need to plan out a strategy for how you will deal with conflict in the future. There will need to be ongoing maintenance to keep the marriage on a biblical track. Marriage requires work and lots of it. Even the best of marriages require time and energy. The cruise control on your car works well on the highway but cruise control in marriage will result in a wreck.
5. Follow God’s blueprint, and leave the results to Him.
Thrift Store Partnership
We are pleased to announce our partnership with Door of Hope as they open a new SACS Family Thrift Store location in Sterling. Door of Hope, a non-profit charitable organization based out of Ashburn, VA has partnered with local churches in Nicaragua, Haiti and Sierra Leone to provide assistance in addressing the oppression, poverty, disease and lack of education opportunities that keep much of the world’s population spiritually lost. Door of Hope collects, sorts and ships used clothes to these poverty-stricken areas which are resold, creating funds for clean water development, employment training, job opportunities, improved sanitation and more than anything else, bringing the hope of Christ to impoverished people.
Your donation of gently used clothing and household items will make a difference in many lives. Through the new Family Thrift Store in Sterling, we are able to make low-cost items available to our local in-need community. Funds from the thrift store directly fund the various international projects mentioned above. In the near future, some of the funds raised will be used to further serve our local community as well. As our partnership with Door of Hope grows, it is our desire to have opportunities to make fully devoted followers of Christ through our relationships with the local customers of the new Sterling location.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED
Donate Items: A large white trailer will be in the RBC parking lot for you to drop off donations of clothing and household items on Sunday mornings. Stop by the Welcome Desk if you would like a receipt for your donation. If you are interested in making a donation during the week, the store is located at 21430 Cedar Drive, Sterling, 20164 (click here for a map). The donation trailer is located behind the store.
Work at the Thrift Store: If you are interested in volunteering to help sort and price items in the store, click here.
Father-Daughter Dance Recap
In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of (sigh) baseball.
It’s true. But before spring hits, February 14th peeps around a wintery corner and we find an affectionate group meandering the Children’s Ministry halls for the 2nd annual Father / Daughter Dance. This is my personal favorite event of the year for our little ladies who come with hair curled, cheeks blushed and a curtsey-worthy gown for a night of fun and conversation with their fathers or special date (who also dress the part in a suit and tie). The evening starts off with fathers tokening their young ladies with corsages and a formal photo shoot. From there, it’s delightful chaos as they spend their evening walking through a couple hundred helium balloons while visiting crafts rooms, eating desert, and finally, dancing the night away!
Yes, it’s meant to be fun and enjoyable (and I think it’s safe to say, it is!), but there is something much deeper at work on this special night. Gavin Long, an RBC dad who attended with his lovely ladies, shares from his perspective:
“The worlds of a father and his young daughter can sometimes be vastly different. Dads are battling in the marketplace, while their daughters are concerned about who likes them at school. Dads are anticipating March Madness, while his daughter is dreaming of a new dress. The Valentine’s Dance creates a common experience to let those two worlds converge. Dads are not always the best when it comes to expressing their feelings, but events like the Valentine’s Dance provide fathers with an environment to connect with their daughters in an intentional and intimate way. Simple events like this go a long way in bridging the potential divide between the worlds of fathers and daughters, providing us, as fathers, with a powerful, but accessible way of communicating love to our little girls. It is that experience of fatherly love that dramatically shapes how our girls think about themselves, their families and God throughout their lives.”
Last year, we received numerous responses back from dads telling us that this night was a springboard for them to initiate a deeper relationship with their girls. Praise the Lord! This year, I was able to see some of the benefits before the night even ended. You’ve got to love overhearing a 2nd grade daughter asking her dad, “I have three things I really like about you. Can I say more than one?”
International Connection’s Talk-a-Latte
Usually once per semester, International Connection (the English as a second language program at RBC) plans a “talk-a-latte” for both morning and evening sessions of classes. This is a time when all four class levels meet together for the last 30 minutes of the class time in the Clubhouse room to have coffee (hence the “latte” part) and snacks, then sit around tables in their class groups with teachers to engage in a particular topic of free discussion. The topic designated for February 14 -15 was “What do you think is the American (culture’s) view of love? What do you think is God’s view?”
After I briefly introduced the concept of Valentine’s Day, I asked them to pause and consider another point of view by watching a music video. We then watched Jason Gray’s video entitled “Remind Me Who I Am” in which many characters were shown holding signs that typified negative characteristics or characters, for example, “Anxious”, “Empty”, “I’m Angry”, “ Victim”, etc. But the crux of the song was that no matter what we think of ourselves or what others may think of us, in God’s eyes we are His “beloved”.
On our tables, in addition to sheets with the song’s lyrics, there was a list of the main vocabulary words written and defined in order to enhance understanding. For the ESL group, any time one can combine words with pictures or visuals of any kind, greater comprehension is achieved. And when one adds music, it adds yet another dimension of interest!
The five tables of students and teachers set about recapping the meaning of the video and song and the lingering question: What is God’s view of love? The word “beloved” is rarely used these days and took some time for the students to grasp – but again, the contrast to the other negative labels mentioned in the song was helpful for gaining understanding. Many of the students could relate to feeling under-valued, abused or “less-than” in this culture. Incidents of discrimination are regular occurrences to the immigrant population here in Northern Virginia. But it was the concept of being God’s “beloved” that surprised many of them. One Buddhist monk came to me and asked for clarification, “Does it mean greatly loved?” he asked. It does.
I closed the talk-a-latte sessions with a short devotional based on John 3:16 (which was made available to each student in his/her first language) and asked for those who are spiritually interested to continue the conversation with me or with their teachers. Both sessions provoked deeper questions than the usual classroom lesson plans even for the first-level students. Our prayer is that the questions will continue and that the Holy Spirit will bear fruit in our students’ lives.
The Simplicity of God’s Word
At BreakThru, our Junior High ministry here at Reston Bible Church, we provide simple journals for the Jr. Highers to use to spend time with God. The journals provide a reading plan, a couple of questions to get them to think about what they read, and some space to write out a prayer to God. This is nothing amazing in concept, but it has been incredible to see what God is doing through them. Just last week, I got an email from a mom telling me how her son uses the journal almost every day, and she has been amazed as she has seen God’s Word at work in her son’s life. This email isn’t unique, as I receive something similar at least once a month.
A lot of times I am tempted to think that if God’s Word isn’t properly “packaged” and turned into something that grabs a teen’s attention, they won’t get anything out of it. But that mindset is like caring more about the wrapping paper than the actual present. God’s Word is “living and active” and is powerful to change lives. We can get distracted by all the glitz of the latest Christian book or podcast sermon. But whether I am an 11 year-old boy or a seminary professor, the Bible speaks and transforms all who will listen.