I volunteer for Family Promise on a regular basis. It's such a simple thing to do that it's hard to ignore the requests for assistance that arrive in my email on a regular basis. This past time, I volunteered to "eat with guests from 5PM-6PM." See what I mean by easy. I'm not a great cook but I am a very good eater! Halloween night is probably a tough night to fill slots. I'm not a fan of the holiday and my kids are long gone so being available was also easy for me. To my surprise this particular assignment turned out to be one of the best ever!
First of all (and this does not happen on every occasion) we had seven absolutely lovely guests: Husband and wife with two children around 9 and 11 years old, one single older woman, and one single mother with a 15-year-old son.
I arrived at about 10 minutes to five and was greeted by Kay Beagle (Zion's Family Promise angel) who has been our leader from the program's inception. She gave me an update on all our guests and then headed home. As I started to set the dinner table Frank Sztuk arrived carrying shopping bags filled with the Halloween dinner his wife Angela had prepared. Here's where the fun starts. Her dinner was not only delicious but lots of fun. It consisted of the following items:
Bleeding spider meatloaf, mashed potatoes with eyes, deviled eggs decorated with black olives to look like spiders, carrot stick fingers with almond slices that looked like fingernails with green dip, and better still … Devil Dogs for dessert.
It was so heartwarming to see the three children light up when they saw the meal all laid out as a buffet. Beyond that, they ate everything. The 15 year old boy had three servings of meatloaf!!! There was plenty of food for all and we all appreciated the time and effort Angela took to make it so special.
I felt so good about our hosting this particular group. They were all such lovely people. The conversation during dinner flowed effortlessly. They expressed numerous times how much they appreciated the assistance they received from Family Promise. They all had stories of hard times but still had optimism about how things would get better in time. The family with two children just found out that day they were approved for a rental in High Bridge. They were overjoyed. After dinner the 3 young people left to trick or treat for about an hour. They were so excited to actually have a neighborhood to walk through. They returned with stories of how Oldwick was such an amazing, fun place. They said all the houses were "a buzz" with lots of treats and scary decorations.
Oh, I don't want to leave out two other important parts of my evening: all of the guests volunteered to clean up after dinner and Robbin Lamo arrived for her shift at 8PM and I stayed an extra hour just to chat with her about life in general and how she and her family were doing. Easy....
What can I say? As I drove home that evening I thought about our Family Promise commitment. It's a good thing and it 's easy. Give it a try.
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