Dear Friends,

Thank you very much for your generous gifts to help Golden Harvest feed the hungry of our community. You may think that you’ve only reached a little ways out to help someone. Wrong! Because the Food Bank’s distribution of grocery assistance reaches virtually every single community in the thirty-county region of eastern Georgia and western South Carolina. Your donations extend our growing food assistance programs and the outreaches we supply far beyond our warehouse doors.

Our area’s extraordinarily high level of poverty and the challenges of the current economic climate cause the need to remain great, especially for the children and the elderly. Thanks be to God, pastors of churches, county government leaders and interested citizens are growing more aware of the problem of hunger and are asking the Food Bank to help them organize new efforts in their locales. This kind of community involvement makes it possible for us to reach everyone in our service region.

Your support has a long reach, and necessarily so. You are critical to putting decent meals on the tables of the needy!

May God bless you for your contribution.

Dear Friends,

Thank you so much for the recent gifts you have bestowed to Golden Harvest Food Bank. I do mean this sincerely. This thanks is not a perfunctory, must-do, check-it-off-the-list-of-a-million-pressing-others thing to do. Your gifts provide the food for the hungry to eat! Your gifts help provide the meals for mothers with children, frightened and alone through abuse. Your on-going financial support provides the space for the homeless and addicted to be fed not only a needed meal but fed hope by volunteers who care.

The most important thing I do is to say thanks. First to God and then to you and all whom He inspires to join with Golden Harvest every day of the year, and year after year, to achieve our mission of ending hunger.

A quick story: I attended the funeral of a long-time Master’s Table volunteer; and one of those who rose to testify about the saintly character of Mr. Henry Banks was a young man who had shown up day after day. He was an addict, and told of how “Mr. Henry” would notice when he would show up, find him on the street and bring him food. The kindness of one of Golden Harvest’s volunteers literally saved this young man who is now regularly employed – and himself volunteers at the Master’s Table every day off that he has!

Yes, let me give you one more “thank you” today; and together let us give thanks for being blessed to share whatever we can with others.

God bless you.

Dear Friends,

These economic times provoke much hand-wringing, anxiety and fear. Every media outlet proclaims more news about the “downturn in the economy.” As far as I can tell, the Food Bank must be the only growth industry around. That’s because our distribution volume is up by 19% over last year at this time. The overwhelming numbers of families in need coming to our partner pantries and agencies are eloquent testimony to the crucial role that Golden Harvest is playing in our region.

Three weeks ago I visited Calvary Church of God in Westminster, SC. They had just opened up a food pantry outreach in a couple of converted rooms of their fellowship hall and that day drove over to Liberty to pick up their first order from Golden Harvest’s Upstate Distribution Center. As I arrived, the first family they had helped was carrying their precious allotment of groceries out to their car. I was close to tears as I realized anew another fruit of our work of 27 years in building the Food Bank as a bulwark against hunger.

Friends, it is your precious gifts that make giving and blessings like Calvary’s possible every day. Thanks be to God, our incoming food inventory has so far kept pace with the demand to “go out.” Your generosity is a direct result of God’s movement in your heart, and I thank you for letting your heart – and your checkbook – be moved! Depriving yourself of some of your money, thereby sharing in some measure in the hardship of the poor, can only result in many blessings from God to you and your family.

Dear Friends,

Thank you very much for giving to help Golden Harvest feed those in need in our community. The recession is producing unprecedented strain on the lives of our underemployed and poor neighbors. Thank goodness the Food Bank is here today and with your continued support, our warehouses are able to send the food pantries and agencies in our 30-county region most of the groceries they require to feed the people.

Even with rising costs, the Food Bank is still able to distribute over seven dollars’ worth of food for every dollar in operating costs! That means that your generous gifts will go further under our care than any other charity I know of. The sheer number of new families requiring help is taxing our ability to get enough food. We get great purchased deals; we get donated food from retailers and manufacturers; we pick up collections from food drives in schools and businesses; we contract with USDA to distribute staple foods under special arrangement with the states of Georgia and South Carolina.

We send our trucks to pick up donations of food all over the southeast – and then turn them around to deliver food orders to rural churches and agencies that do not have sufficient vehicle capability to hold the increasing amounts of foods needed.

Thanks again for giving, even as I’m sure you yourself are experiencing tightening your own financial belt. Somehow you know, deep inside, that satisfying the basic need for food for our low-income children, elderly neighbors and families simply HAVE to be done!

God bless you and reward you with His love and peace.

Dear Friends,

There is an awesome “grace,” I’ll call it, which has been sweeping through our whole region. It is a song of brotherhood and a spirit of giving, whose wave is washing up on the shore of Golden Harvest Food Bank. So thank you, because you are a part of this beautiful response to God’s call to open our hearts and resources to those in need. Other examples abound, but I’ll mention just a couple of them.

An elderly minister just inherited a fortune; he has always lived simply and doesn’t want or need the money. Today some of that fortune came ashore at the Food Bank to feed the hungry. Last week I attended a small ladies prayer group whose members give small amounts of money all during the year to help feed the poor. Even though their leader died this year, they kept to the tradition and invited me in to receive their donation.

My heartfelt thanks for helping to refill Golden Harvest’s warehouse, stretched so thin in these difficult times. I give glory to God for your support of the Food Bank’s mission. I leave you with thoughts from the sermon at Midnight Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome: “if at the moment of the announcement to the shepherds ‘the angels had known God in the grandeur of the universe, in the reason and the beauty of the cosmos that come from Him and are a reflection of him’ then that night ‘something new had happened, something that astounded them. ... The God who sustains all things and bears them in His hands - He Himself had entered into human history, He had become someone who acts and suffers within history. From the joyful amazement that this unimaginable event called forth, from God’s new and further way of making Himself known ... a new song was born, one verse of which the Christmas Gospel has preserved for us: 'Glory to God in the highest heavens and peace to His people on earth'. ... God’s glory is in the highest heavens, but His high state is now found in the stable - what was lowly has now become sublime. God’s glory is on the earth, it is the glory of humility and love.’”