When volunteers showed up at Hope House on Good Friday, the first thing they noticed was that the food shelf was almost empty. When they went out to the shed to bring in some supplies to refill the shelf, they found that the food stores in the shed were almost gone, too.
Hope House provides food on days when the Bellingham Food Bank is not open, or when a client does not have a Bellingham address (because non-Bellingham addresses cannot be served at the food bank). Friday evenings are big food days because it's the last chance many clients have to get food until Monday. Fridays can always expect a heavy draw on the food shelf. With the food stores as low as they were, volunteers wondered how much food would be left for next week.
Volunteers started the coffee and got ready to open. Hope House opens at 4 pm on Fridays and at 4:08 a woman in a mini-van drove up and started unloading bags of food. She had just started when another community-member parked her truck behind Hope House and started bringing in boxes of food. These donations more than filled the food shelves.
As the evening went on, many clients requested food, and the food flew off the shelves, but more donations continued to arrive. By closing time, not only were the food shelves abundantly full, volunteers were taking food out to the shed for storage.
This sort of thing seems to happen a lot at Hope House. While cans of creamed corn and tuna aren't exactly loaves and fishes, the rules still seem to be the same: give what you have and trust God to make it enough. God provides abundance; Hope House operates by trusting in God's abundance.
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