Singing Oaks responded with large donations of groceries and over $9,000 during October’s Harvest Sunday. Your food gifts filled up most of our food pantry shelves. The most used food items donated have lasted less than a month. Since Harvest Sunday, I’ve already purchased over $3,000 worth of food.

It seems the only time you hear from me is with a plea for groceries or money. Benevolence assistance always costs us something – 99 % of the people who come to us have financial needs. As mentioned before, the only way we could solve some of these problems would be to “adopt” them. The neediest usually have no family available or willing to assist them.

I have discontinued helping non-members with rent and utilities since October and this is continuing through the end of this year. We’ve spent our budget and cash flow here at church has been tight. We continue helping with reasonably priced prescription drugs and extreme hardship needs for housing or utilities.

An example of this extreme hardship showed up with a single mom with two children who were on the street because her estranged husband left them “high and dry.” She couldn’t pay the rent so they were kicked out of their apartment leaving them no choice but to live on the street. This happened at the start of school. Both her daughters could not start to school until she had a resident address. We put this family up in a motel and before mom could find a job that would pay enough for her rent, we ended up helping them for 5 weeks. Mom is now working and the kids are in school with access to bus service. This one incident wiped out our rental funds but we were able to get a family out of the weather and on the road to a somewhat normal life. I consider this money well spent. One of the judgment calls for my extreme spending decisions is: “If we help, is there hope for this person or family’s ability to get on their feet and move on with their lives?” Many cases don’t have this hope.

The number of ministries here at Singing Oaks requiring financial assistance continues to grow. The more we do the more the need for money to support these works. God has blessed us with a giving spirit and you always respond with the monetary assistance needed for success. The latest example is the 70 grocery baskets and 70 turkeys given to needy families this Thanksgiving. Community in Schools identified the needy families and we provided the food.

I have had numerous people ask why we don’t have the equivalent of Harvest Sunday twice a year. Based on this year’s experience I’ve taken their advice and picked April 27, 2014, as our Spring Harvest Sunday. I hope I’m not wearing you out with these requests.

I’d like to take this time to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas. Jesus is truly the reason for this season. We are trying our best to treat people like Jesus did. Thank you for practicing this Christ-like benevolent spirit.