Flood Love Christmas Breakfast
Flood love had the opportunity to serve a pancake breakfast this year to the homeless. We were so blessed to see how God provided for this event and how much He wanted to show his love to people who so desperately needed to see it.
I got the idea while reading the book crazy love by Francis Chan shortly before Thanksgiving. Many of the regulars who do flood love were going to be out of town for Thanksgiving, but a few people said they wanted to do it. So it began with myself, Dave Gladson, and Reuben and Nicki Rail.At first I really hoped we would be able to feed 50 people and give out 50 blankets as Christmas gifts. We sent out an email and as the weeks went by we had no one else step up. I knew God placed this on my heart so I figured it will just be the four of us, somehow God will provide the resources, and we will get to as many people as possible.
With a couple weeks left until Christmas we started planning out the event one night at Starbucks; at the end of the night we found out Starbucks would donate all of the coffee we needed. We were praising God for something coming off our list! Within the next week we had 50 people volunteer to help us,more than half of the supplies were purchased and dropped off at flood, and we had a Costco gift card donated that covered everything else. Then I received an email from a guy who said Walmart was going to donate the rest of the blankets we needed and he just needed to know how many we were short! We even had an unexpected donation on the last day to buy the burners for our chafing dishes, which was the last thing we needed. We were so blessed by how God was providing for this and confirmed we were meant to do this.
On Christmas eve seven of us met at 2:30am to make 300 pancakes. At four am the rest of our wonderful volunteers showed up to wrap ribbons around the blankets, write in the greeting cards, and make bags of butter, syrup, and utensils. We left the offices at 4:50am and got downtown shortly after five am. We had 90 greeting cards, 50 blankets, 20 sweatshirts, 36 pairs of sock, 65 bags of homemade cookies (courtesy of Dave’s mom!), 287 pancakes, two thermoses of hot chocolate, and four thermoses of coffee. We split up into two groups near 15th street. We were really hoping we would be able to distribute everything and not have any left overs, well we ended up running out of everything in about 20 minutes! Everyone was so grateful for being served pancakes and coffee on a cold( for San Diego) morning. One of the volunteers told me one of the men they were serving started to cry as he was given his coffee. We were able to serve 70 people breakfast that morning.
Many of the people who served breakfast on Christmas morning were able to sit down and talk and pray with people about their current situation. The best part of this is the opportunity we have to pray with people. We saw so much of Gods love for the homeless and how much He wants to reach them. We were all given an amazing chance to pray with those who are hurting and need Gods love and direction.
For more information on flood love please visit floodlovesd.org
December 27th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Great job Flood Love Team! Very encouraging and inspiring! I appreciate and admire how you stepped out in faith to serve others Well Done.