Well Fed On the Town

I realize that it’s past Thanksgiving, but I was thinking of what Thanksgiving-related topic fits the ‘Well Fed On The Town’ theme. Most cities of any size will typically have some sort of Thanksgiving dinner for a lot of people, and Dayton, Ohio, is no different. Elder Beerman, a company that owns department stores in the area, has put on a really big dinner of that sort for years. My church, the Dayton Vineyard, does something a bit different that I always get a lot out of doing.

We call it ‘Turkeys Giving Away Turkeys’, and it’s evolved over the last 15 or more years. A dozen years ago, we would take in thawed turkeys to the church on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, and pile into cars to deliver turkeys all over town. It was a madhouse, and it was a lot of fun. Over the years, this continued, and started to include a couple of the pastors doing turkey bowling with a frozen turkey.

This year, we did things a little differently. The church got about 300 boxes and put a list in each box of items to make up a Thanksgiving dinner. People voluntarily took the boxes home, filled them, and brought them in the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Instead of delivering turkeys to predetermined addresses as we’d done before, over 350 people split into three groups and went to three different apartment complexes in less privileged areas.

Once we got to our apartment complex, the groups started randomly choosing apartments and delivering whole meals to the people there.Now some people reading this may be thinking that it sounds typical to have church people bring something like a meal, but then try to save whoever is there to get the meal … Nothing’s free, right? Wrong. One thing I really love about my church is that there truly are no strings attached when we do something like this. I was with a group of about six of us, and we delivered three dinners to three random apartments. Yes, we offered to pray for the people, but we asked first, and had they not wanted us to pray for them, we would have offered a ‘Happy Thanksgiving’, smiled and left to go to the next apartment we chose.

The first apartment was the apartment of a single mother that was pregnant with her second child. Her reaction got us started in good spirits. Instead of resenting that we had a turkey dinner for her, she just got a bit of a smile on her face and welcomed us in. She was really pleasant and thanked us.

We knocked on the next door but got no answer, so we went on to another apartment. The woman there had just gotten home from the hospital, and when she saw that we had a Thanksgiving meal, she started crying, telling us that she didn’t think her family was going to have Thanksgiving this year.

When we left her apartment, someone was looking for us. A friend of the person that lived in the apartment where we got no answer told us the woman there was diabetic and couldn’t get to the door, so we went back and left our last dinner with her, with her friend promising to cook the dinner for her on Thursday.What was the point of all this? Well, it wasn’t an opportunity to feel like we’d done a good deed. It was a chance to just give some people a holiday dinner that they may have otherwise skipped. The people helping deliver the turkeys did it because they wanted to help, not because it was a chance to thump people over the head with bibles.

I’m not writing this to push my faith on any readers. I’m sure some of the other Well Fed writers don’t agree with my beliefs, and I’m not making this a forum for anything like that. I’m just saying it was a great day, and it was great seeing people not be cynical about giving or receiving something that day. Since it was a random deliver, no one was expecting a dinner, feeling entitled to get what they’d been promised.

I am writing this because we’re entering a time when there are a lot of opportunities to get involved in little ways. Helping by donating gifts, adopting a family for Christmas, giving coats to people that won’t have them for the winter otherwise … The holiday season, whether approached in a religious or secular manner, is an chance to personally help someone. I hope we all take advantage of it. The world’s a big place, but little bits of kindness help make it smaller.