Lessons in Gratitude Day 419

It was a long, tiring three-and-a-half hours at the Berkeley Food Pantry today. We served nearly 90 families in the small two-hour window during which we provide food to our clients. We were short-staffed on a day when the line up to the door curled out of sight into the parking lot and around the corner. There were points during that two hours when we were running short on food, people were coming in for bags faster than we could put them together. We worked nonstop for nearly three hours–my back and legs are tired and aching. But I am grateful to have been there today serving my neighbors.

There were familiar faces I’ve come to know over the year that I’ve worked at the pantry, but there were also newcomers, first timers coming in to get food because they could no longer figure out how to get through the month without help. I can’t help but believe that something is terribly wrong with the way things are happening in the country when I look at the range of people who were in the line today. Among the first timers was an ex-college professor who had lost his job a few years ago and has been trying to piece together a living ever since. I had first met him at the school where I had been employed and had been laid off from in March of last year. It was kind of a surreal moment for the two of us to be standing there. These are tough times for a lot of people.

I am grateful for the work of the Berkeley Food Pantry, for the service it provides for so many people in the community; but I wish that it didn’t exist and that it weren’t doing such a vigorous business as we did today. For so many people to be so in need of food in such numbers speaks to me of something being fundamentally wrong in our country. The statistics on hunger in America are staggering, and the people who show up at places like the Berkeley Food Pantry are not who some people might expect to be there. The face of American hunger is that of your neighbor whom you have no idea is struggling to make ends meet. It could be the student sitting next to you in class or the receptionist at your doctor’s office. It could be  a former college professor and a former university administrator meeting over two bags of groceries rather than a glass of wine.

Back in the days when I was much more financially comfortable than I currently am, I used to write decent-sized checks to a number of charities, including the local food pantry and an area homeless shelter that serves pregnant women. It’s one thing for me to write a check to a charitable organization that’s doing good work and write the contribution off on my taxes, but it has been another affair entirely to be actually working there week in and week out and interacting with the clients. And quite different for me to have experienced times when I was grateful to be volunteering there because my own refrigerator didn’t have much in it but condiments and I was able to take some food home for myself.

I am grateful for the moment of wisdom that compelled me to begin volunteering at the Berkeley Food Pantry in June of 2011. To have been able to give to and connect with my fellow human beings and join in the hard and rewarding work with my fellow volunteers has been and remains a powerful anchor in my life. When I am once again financially comfortable, I will be able to resume my charitable giving, which I have not been able to do in the last 18 months or so. But as best I can, wherever my “what’s next” leads me, I will continue to find ways to serve and support others with the gifts of my time and energy as well as my finances. God, let it be so!