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.

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.

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.

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.’”

The news is not good. I’m not even speaking about the U.S. economy or world financial markets, because Golden Harvest is not that kind of Bank! Our stockholders don’t pressure me to increase shareholder value, and our depositors don’t go online to check the balances in their accounts.

No, the bad news is simply the fact our “Bank” must exist at all! The sad truth is that more and more families are out of work and are at our partner food pantries’ doors. The Board of Directors of our Bank demand only one simple thing from me and the staff: end hunger in our area! So what do we do? Devote only five cents of every dollar of revenue to administration and fund-raising, and use the 95 cents directly toward acquisition and the distribution of food! That stellar ratio in fact earned Golden Harvest the South Carolina Secretary of State’s “Angel Award” this year for being such a well-run charity!

Thank you very much for not letting the “bad news” of having hungry people in our towns and neighborhoods get you down. Your concern lets Golden Harvest bring GOOD NEWS to thousands of the needy in our communities of eastern Georgia and western South Carolina. Your “deposit” in our bank yields a whopping 700% interest, being multiplied seven times in the value of food distributed! That’s also good news.

May God bless you this Thanksgiving and Christmas for your generosity.

Dear Friends,

Your generosity keeps Golden Harvest from having to say “No!” when our partner agencies and churches turn in orders for food. Your generosity keeps food on the table for so many families in need each and every day.

In short, your generosity is a proof to me that, yes, God is still on the throne and is definitely inspiring people all over our community to join together to minister his love to the hurting. And speaking of inspiration, I was truly inspired the other day when I went out to Stevens Creek Elementary School. The lunchroom supervisor there, Mrs. McDonald, had helped organize a fund drive for world hunger and once her goal was met, she kept collecting for local hunger relief. She raised $552 for the Food Bank! I asked her how she motivated the kids throughout the Columbia County School System to get so involved. She said, “You have to reach to the stars before you can make it past the roof!”

It just takes each of us, “reaching to the stars” and doing more than we or others think possible, to make a significant change for the better in the lives of others.

God bless you, and again, thanks for the inspiration!

Yet in spite of this innate knowledge, it is becoming more and more acceptable to “pig out,” load up at a buffet, take much more than we could possibly eat. Our culture today teaches us to deny the curb on our appetites built into each of us by God and even celebrate our excess!

Supporting the mission of Golden Harvest to end hunger in our region can really be “counter-cultural,” especially if we sincerely live by the virtue of moderation so that we might be able to bless others with our extra food and funds, rather than ourselves. Your support is a blessing to those in need of food assistance, AND you are stretching to reach the “high bar.” It is TRULY more blessed to give than to receive.

So may God, who has provided enough on this earth for everyone’s needs, indeed bless you abundantly for your generosity.

This week has been unusual is one respect in that I’ve been challenged to solve two riddles! I’m no good at riddles, but I have to admit they’re fun because it’s always a surprise to see the answer, and who in the group is able to figure it out first. Here’s the first one (attributed to Paul Harvey): “What is greater than God, more evil than the Devil, the poor have plenty of it, the rich need it, and if you eat it you will die?”

The second riddle is an exercise of logic: discover which of three light switches mounted on the wall of one room controls the ceiling light in another room; the door to the room is closed and the door fits so tightly that no light from inside is visible from the outside and you may enter the room only once.

Children are more quick to solve the first riddle than adults! And yes, the second riddle is solvable! For the answers email me at: mfirmin@goldenharvest.org 

Riddles are riddles because they seem to present a quandary, contradictory sets of data that don’t admit of solutions. Sometimes they’re no longer fun, and the longer you think the more upset you can get, especially if others are solving it ahead of you. But riddles are a game, and not to be taken too seriously.

Golden Harvest, however, deals with the very serious “riddle,” if you will, of hunger. Most people don’t understand it because they don’t have all the data; it doesn’t admit of easy solutions. Some families can get upset watching others that seem to have all the breaks and regain self-sufficiency, while they can’t ever gather a necessary critical mass of assets to help get them out of poverty. Your donations help thousands of pounds of grocery products leave our warehouses every day to come to aid of those temporarily in need and those who seem to be stuck in more systemic poverty.

Why not help us provide food assistance all across this region so we can stop, if only for a moment, the real riddle that persists for so many families: “where is the next meal to come from?”

God bless you.

Even though the future was really never “secure,” most of us have lived as though it was. In other words, our assumptions were that tomorrow and next week and next year would offer the same general panorama of opportunities to enjoy life and prosper as today offers. It was very difficult for most of us to identify with the fear and uncertainty that the poor have to live with every day, even for the basics of life, like having enough food to eat. In spite of the “disconnect” with the reality of the lives of many of our needy neighbors, though, we still decided to be generous with our financial support of Golden Harvest, and trusted that its connection with those in need was genuinely helpful and efficient.

Thank you again for that trust. Each day seems to be more challenging than the one before for us to make enough food available for the growing numbers (9,000 more family visits to food pantries this year over last year so far). Again, I can’t say “thank you” enough.

But now, with gas and food prices rising daily, our assumptions about the future are not quite as comfortable. I think more and more of us, if we give it some thought, can “make the connection” a lot more easily with the poor to whom we give help. The times require us to reaffirm our solidarity and community, and help each other stay hopeful and at peace. The Old Testament and the New Testament of the Bible teach us that we are indeed “our brother’s keeper.”

May God keep you and your family in His peace!