Monday, January 24, 2011

The man at the end of the ramp

Last night, Gary and I went to Central Market to get some Christmas presents (this celebrating in February/March thing is quite nice) and as we got off of the LRT and went down the escalator, there was a man sitting on the ground with a plastic cup.  Before we reached him, another man stopped and dropped some change in the cup.  Gary had given him some money before when we have seen him there and he did the same this time.  However, this time we had a little something extra and that was some left over food from Hard Rock Cafe.  As we walked away I said, "You know we could just give him my left over food."  Gary said, "You know that's not a bad idea.  You wanna do that?"  I said, "Might as well."  So we went back and gave it to him.  You never know if the person is going to actually accept it, but he did gladly.  He probably had no idea what was inside because their take-away boxes are a little different than others, but when we were all done shopping (hmmm hmmm ran out of cash) we went back to the LRT and he was no longer there.  We like to think that he was able to stop begging for money because he already had food for the night.

How many times do we leave a restaurant and either:
1. Don't clear our plate and just allow the server to throw it away
or
2. Take home the left overs and they sit in our fridge until they are way too bad to eat and we trash them?

Why not box it up and give it to someone you might see on your way home.  Is there a place you drive by often that has a homeless person at the corner most of time?  I know there are plenty in Nashville.

There is a preacher in Nashville, Bill Watkins, that keeps non-parishable food items in his car at all times for when he sees someone on the side of the road.  Gary has said many times that he wants to start doing that, but just hasn't yet.  A simple task of buying a few extra cans everytime you head to the grocery store and keeping them in your car for such occasions seems like a great idea to me.  If we all did this how many less people would be hungry in our community?

Use your left overs (or canned goods) for something good,

5 comments:

Kristen said...

I like the idea of keeping canned food in your car. I've never done that but we have given leftover restaurant food to homeless people before. We don't see that so much around here, but when we travel in bigger cities, we see homeless people everywhere. We would rather give them food than money - you want to help but sometimes you never know what they'll use the money for. :/

Unknown said...

I am so glad I found your blog. I pray God blesses you and your husband in your work. You are awesome!

Juliane McCorkle said...

I would love to just hang out with ya'll because I feel like we would get a long so well as a couple! We do stuff like that too! Probably not as much as we should though... Thanks for the reminder! :)

Becky W said...

Great idea!!!!

He Sings Over Me! said...

Thanks for posting this. You know I recently started my blog and also posted about homeless people. We really do have step it up and help people in need.