Light shines in darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it

I work in a decent sized, local, indie bookstore. It’s a great job 99% of the time and a lot of our customers are pretty neat people. Any who, middle of the day this little old lady comes up. She’s lovably kooky. She effuses how much she loves the store and how she wishes she could spend more time in it but her husband is waiting in the car (OH! I BETTER BUY HIM SOME CHOCOLATE!), she piles a bunch of art supplies on the counter and then stops and tells me how my bangs are beautiful and remind her of the ocean (“Wooooosh” she says, making a wave gesture with her hand)

Ok. I think to myself. Awesomely happy, weird little old ladies are my favorite kind of customer. They’re thrilled about everything and they’re comfortably bananas. I can have a good time with this one. So we chat and it’s nice.

Then this kid, who’s been up my counter a few times to gather his school textbooks, comes up in line behind her (we’re connected to a major university in the city so we have a lot of harried students pass through). She turns around to him and, out of nowhere, demands that he put his textbooks on the counter. He’s confused but she explains that she’s going to buy his textbooks.

He goes sheetrock white. He refuses and adamantly insists that she can’t do that. It’s like, $400 worth of textbooks. She, this tiny old woman, bodily takes them out of her hands, throws them on the counter and turns to me with a intense stare and tells me to put them on her bill. The kid at this point is practically in tears. He’s confused and shocked and grateful. Then she turns to him and says “you need chocolate.” She starts grabbing handfuls of chocolates and putting them in her pile.

He keeps asking her “why are you doing this?” She responds “Do you like Harry Potter?“ and throws a copy of the new Cursed Child on the pile too.

Finally she’s done and I ring her up for a crazy amount of money. She pays and asks me to please give the kid a few bags for his stuff. While I’m bagging up her merchandise the kid hugs her. We’re both telling her how amazing she is and what an awesome thing she’s done. She turns to both of us and says probably one of the most profound, unscripted things I’ve ever had someone say:

“It’s important to be kind. You can’t know all the times that you’ve hurt people in tiny, significant ways. It’s easy to be cruel without meaning to be. There’s nothing you can do about that. But you can choose to be kind. Be kind.”

The kid thanks her again and leaves. I tell her again how awesome she is. She’s staring out the door after him and says to me: “My son is a homeless meth addict. I don’t know what I did. I see that boy and I see the man my son could have been if someone had chosen to be kind to him at just the right time.”

I’ve bagged up all her stuff and at this point am super awkward and feel like I should say something but I don’t know what. Then she turns to me and says: I wish I could have bangs like that but my darn hair is just too curly.“ And leaves.

Jesus was murdered. Whenever someone presents a watered down version of Jesus like you’re doing here, I really wonder if that fact is completely ignored. People who weren’t His followers were outraged by His ministry and set the events of His death in motion. And that wasn’t because He said what everyone wanted to hear and said “sin all you want, I don’t care.” He actively pointed out sin. He called people to repent for their sins. He told the woman caught in adultery who He saved from stoning, “Go and sin no more”. And that’s what He says to each and every one of us.

He wasn’t scourged to the point that his bones muscles were exposed and he literally became unrecognizable, then nailed to a cross because people thought he was “chill”.

 “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn

“‘a man against his father,    a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—   a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’

 “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.”

-Matthew 10: 32-39

(Here’s Matthew 10)

God has not called us to be nice.  Rather, He has called us to be good.  Here’s the difference: nice people never confront evil.  Good people do.  Nice people are weak.  Good people are strong.

MONEY. WE WANT MONEY. MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY. WE CAN DO SO MUCH WITH IT. WE HAVE ACCESS TO DEALS YOU COULD NEVER. MONEY

That aside.

 I’m only going to talk about food items but if your food bank takes personal items, a lot of times diapers, feminine hygiene products, etc, are very very welcome. 

1) Canned chicken and beef 

looooooove this stuff. It’s expensive, it lasts forever, it tastes good and it can be used a variety of ways. This stuff is fucking catnip to food banks, it’s so hard for us to provide proteins. 

2) Fancy nut butters

Peanut butter is a standby for food banks as a shelf-stable inexpensive protein, but if we have a family with a kid with a peanut allergy that’s not going to work. Non-peanut butters are expensive and it’s something we hardly ever see donated. (we also like peanut butter, but that’s easier for us to buy ourselves than non-peanut butters)

3) Canned or packaged tuna

You may notice a trend here in shelf-stable proteins. And yeah. That’s basically it, so I’m not going to keep harping on it. But this stuff is a godsend. 

4) Easy breakfast things for kids (Granola bars, instant oatmeal, and the like) 

Whatever Donald Trump tells you, most people who get food from food banks are actually working their asses off and so they have to leave Obama to raise their baby or whatever, and they don’t have a lot of time in the morning. Things like this that kids can make for themselves are expensive. (Another trend you may be noticing–donate shit that costs a lot of money. That helps us more than all the shitty green bean cans in the world) But they are so helpful for busy working families where the parents may not have a set schedule and sometimes little Amanda is making her own breakfast before she runs off to school. Don’t let kids go to school hungry. 

5) Shelf-stable juice

A penny drive.

(DuckDuckGo tells me a penny in 1999 would be worth two cents in 2023, but given how much food prices have gone up, I’d make this a dime drive in the modern day.)

Here’s how it works.

Every classroom got a gallon water jug. You brought in your pennies from home and put them in the jug. Every penny equaled one point, and at the end of a set time period, the classroom with the most points won a pizza party. All the funds were then donated.

BUT.

You will notice I didn’t say the class with the most pennies. I said the class with the most POINTS.

And that is because you could sabotage other classrooms by putting other denominations in their jugs. The number of pennies equal to the cent amount of those denominations would then be deducted from the penny total (so for example a nickel would lose you five points). I saw one kid absolutely TANK some of the eighth-graders by dropping a five-dollar bill in their jug, which they then had to make up in pennies before they could make any further progress.

(If you’re wondering who rolled all those pennies: it was me. Literally it was me, I volunteered because I’m an autistic weirdo who thinks counting change is fun and it got me out of class. The office ladies helped too.)

To modify this for adults, consider having it be one work shift versus another. Or there are multiple jars split between options for a vote and you get to vote by putting your change in a jar. And you MUST include the sabotage—for one it makes it more like a game, which humans love. And for another, if you’re asking for quarter donations but someone really wants to tank another group, they’re gonna whip out a twenty dollar bill. It generates higher donations because people want to win by nature.

But we look back everyday- rechecking emails, making sure a friend is still behind you, checking to see if you remebered to pick up your keys. It's second nature, a habit of care.