A truck trailer, an 18-wheeler, stands parked in front of the parsonage, in the place where we sell Christmas trees these days. The far end deep inside the trailer is solid dark, but at the open end two smiles brighten the early evening. It is already autumn, cool and darker earlier in the day. From outside the trailer, I see two smiling ladies. It seems an unlikely place for them to be. They are laughing as they work. They enjoy working together. They are sorting and hanging clothes. It is a new thing for our church, this yard sale to raise money for world hunger.
That tractor trailer, that year, was one of the main places for those things that are now so familiar: accepting and sorting donations. Imagine if we had a record or catalog of every item that has been donated. At some point right away our church members realized that accepting donations means having to sort them. That work has happened in one way or another all down through these past forty-some years, and in several different locations on our campus. We didn’t have a gym back then at the beginning, and we probably didn’t have free space in the Education Building at that time either. The “pod” idea for storage wasn’t really known back then like it is now. That’s why a tractor trailer truck was pulled up in front of the parsonage.
“when people come together to do something good and to give of themselves, a spirit of fellowship rises up among them, a fellowship that makes light of heat or sweat or dirt or tiredness.”
The two ladies in the trailer are Mrs. Zollie Reed and Mrs. Lib Caldwell. They would have had to have a ladder or steps to get up there. I can see them now. They are smiling as they work because the same spirit of generous willingness that we have seen through the years was there right back at the very beginning, and these dear ladies knew the same thing that we have found: That when people come together to do something good and to give of themselves, a spirit of fellowship rises up among them, a fellowship that makes light of heat or sweat or dirt or tiredness. It was so back then, and it still is now. It has been there from the beginning.
World Hunger Day at First Baptist Church – Huntersville started in 1982 when a small prayer group felt led to organize fundraisers to help feed people. Since then over a million dollars have been raised and countless lives touched. This year World Hunger Day starts at 7:30 on Saturday, Sept. 30 at the north parking lot.
On the cover, Paul and Lib Caldwell chat with the Rev. Spurgeon Dorton at World Hunger Day 2002.
