Food Stamp Challenge, Day 7

Well, I've been Food Stamp Challenged for a week now. I lived on $30 worth of groceries for the past seven days, and I only cheated a little bit. The first way I cheated was by going to the Cub Scouts' Blue and Gold Banquet at church on Friday and eating there--but hey, I don't schedule these things. The second way was that Sarah came over on Sunday and we made dinner and I opened a jar of the good spaghetti sauce. By "good" I mean the $2 store brand kind already in the cupboard, or in other words, anything but pasta sauce in a can. The most important lesson I learned this week: pasta sauce in a can may cost 75 cents, but it also tastes like crap. I'd like to think I would have suffered through it on my own, but I wasn't going to start subjecting my guests to it.

Some other thoughts, reflections, and lessons in no particular order:

1. I enjoy oatmeal for breakfast. I might keep that up. One serving, unlike with any cereal I've encountered, fills the whole bowl. And it's natural, and has fiber, and all that.

2. I got used to not having coffee surprisingly quickly. I miss it, but more as a morning comfort, rather than as a headache and general fogginess alleviater. That's good, because I doubt it's fitting in the budget anytime soon. If I could buy it at all, I couldn't buy fair trade--and I stand by my coffee ethics!

3. I have been extremely hungry every day between lunch and dinner. This is one reason I ordinarily spend so much money eating lunch out: I have almost never managed to be full on a lunch I pack for myself. At the beginning of the week lunch was a peanut butter sandwich, applesauce, carrot sticks, and a banana. Then I ran out of bananas. Either way it wasn't enough.

4. But dinner's been OK, too. Beans and rice taste OK with just a little salt and pepper. It's annoying to have to soak and cook dry beans for so long before I can eat them, but it's not so bad if I plan ahead, and they're tons cheaper than canned. Another thing I might keep up. And on pasta days I missed the cheese on top, but once we opened up that jar of real sauce it was just like normal.

5. It is possible to eat healthy on a food stamp budget--in fact, this is healthiest I've eaten in a long time. I've had to pay attention to serving sizes and variety in a way I never do. I've eaten an egg each day as a cheap, protein-filled snack, and I looked up nutritional info to make sure I wasn't getting too much cholesterol that way. Then I checked the rest of my groceries--that was the only source of cholesterol in my diet. It is true that my meals have been carb-centered (but all whole grain) and I had to ration my fruit and vegetables more than I would have liked. Oh, and the one thing I probably didn't get enough of: calcium. I had some milk each day, but I am used to getting a significant portion of my dietary calcium from cheese in all forms and expensive Greek yogurt, neither of which I could afford.

6. I have a few things left over: some oatmeal, and beans and rice, and frozen peppers. Hopefully this means I can go shopping tomorrow and increase my stock. I'm especially excited for some yogurt and more fresh veggies.

7. Being social is awkward (I mean, more than usual) on a food stamp budget. I went to a movie with Kim on Saturday but couldn't buy anything to eat before or after--where do you talk to someone when you can't buy food? And Sarah almost didn't know what to do with me when I said did she want to hang out but I couldn't do anything food related--though we did end up having a lovely day walking around Waller Mill Park. Still, I'm glad for that reason that this is the end of my "strict" week--that now I can go out to eat with friends, and just donate double the amount I spend to our Lenten Offering at church.

8. My pants fit better. This makes me not want to start going out to eat again at all.

Saturday I'm going to Atlanta on Wesley's spring break mission trip, so I'm not sure I'll be able to control much of my diet there. Still, I'm looking forward to learning more in the next few days and weeks--how much I can save with coupons, how much I can save just by shopping at Walmart, what difference it makes to spread $60 over two weeks instead of $30 over one. We'll see

Food Stamp Challenge, Day T-1

Tomorrow begins this year's Lenten discipline: I'm taking on the Food Stamp Challenge.

From now till Easter, I'm attempting to live on the average amount given to food stamp recipients in Virginia in 2011. It works out to just over $30 a week for one person. I hope doing this will help me to understand a little better how some of my neighbors in this community live. Lots of the people I see for financial assistance are on food stamps. In fact, one article I found said that about 1500 people in Williamsburg receive food stamps--a number that is growing.

I wasn't sure how I felt about not being able to go out to eat with friends for all of Lent, though, so I'm doing things this way: for Week 1, starting tomorrow, I'm going to be strict about it. After that, I'll give myself a little leeway. I'll still keep careful track of what I spend on food, but if I go over the $30 (or eat out) I'll donate twice the difference to my church's Lenten offering.

I've been spending the last week using up food that's already around so I can't fall back on raiding the fridge. Yesterday I took stock of what I still had that I didn't want to use up or get rid of: half a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. I subtracted $4 from the $30 to account for those.

Then today I went shopping during my break between bells and staff meeting. It was a different experience than usual to be sure. I'm used to looking at prices and buying the cheaper versions of things, but I'm not used to having to add everything up as I go. I'm not used to having to weigh whether it's worth more to spend 30 extra cents on something with no high-fructose corn syrup, or to rationing my vegetables.

I left Martin's with rice, two kinds of beans, a box of pasta and a can of sauce, peanut butter, oatmeal, bananas, applesauce, a big can of mandarin oranges, a bag of whole carrots, a potato, a bag of frozen broccoli and a bag of frozen peppers. Oh, and some salt and pepper.

It came to $23.68. I left satisfied that I still had a little over $2 to ration throughout the week--maybe to supplement the banana supply. Except that when I pulled back into the church parking lot I realized I hadn't bought any bread to go with my peanut butter. No problem, I thought--I'll stop at Walmart on my way back from the hospital this afternoon. I don't usually shop at Walmart, but desperate times, after all, call for desperate measures.

I found the bakery section of Walmart before I found the cheap bread hidden away in the back. As I wandered around looking at loaves that cost $4 each, I started to feel genuinely worried. I don't often buy bread--had I misjudged the price? My lunch plans for the whole week revolved around peanut butter sandwiches, and now I literally might not be able to afford the bread at all.

I did eventually find the cheap bread, and bought a loaf for $2. (I could have gone cheaper if I'd gone for the high-fructose corn syrup variety.) That left just about 50 cents for the week, and I'm taking that to justify the use of some existing brown sugar in my pantry on my morning oatmeal.

So there you have it--I'm out. I have all the food I get to eat for the week. I'm pretty sure it will be enough, but I'm also pretty sure it's going to get old. And that it's going to require a few lifestyle adjustments. For example, I bought the kind of beans you have to soak. I'm pretty sure I haven't soaked beans since I lived in Lesotho. And the carrots, which I'll cut up into sticks tonight--another thing I haven't made the effort to do in a while. And the lack of cheese on the menu is going to be a definite challenge. Maybe at the end of this week I'll have some food left over and be able to invest in some cheese or yogurt for next.

So we'll see how it goes. Right now I'm looking forward to starting on this. It's going to require some heightened intentionality, but after all, that's the point. In the end, I know I'm lucky: this is something I get to choose to do, rather than something I have to. Hopefully it will help me be mindful of those who don't have that choice.

Christmas Eve: thoughts from the colonial side

This morning my plan was to finish tomorrow's sermon at Aromas and then take a walk down Duke of Gloucester Street. This, as it turned out, was also the plan of everyone else in Williamsburg and their dog. It was crowded, and that annoyed me a little. I had wanted to be alone with my thoughts to ponder lofty and holy things like Incarnation and the True Meaning of Christmas.

Luckily (inspired by this article I shared recently on Facebook), it didn't take me long to realize how silly it was to want to be alone to ponder the incarnation. So instead, I noticed the people around me, and that became my prayer. I noticed the woman walking her two sweater-clad, antlered greyhounds; the toddler jumping on a wooden stage saying, "Jump! Jump! Jump!"; the Russian tourists figuring out where they were; the boy pretending to shoot passersby with his fake rifle; the fifers, and the drummers; the young woman hugging Santa in Merchant's Square; the group of maybe eight Occupy Williamsburg protesters huddled around a Christmas tree with a sign at the top that proclaimed, "A better world is possible."

This is the life God enters. All of it.

Colonial Williamsburg has always been a place where the past meshes with the present so that it's sometimes hard to tell the difference. Kids with light-up shoes wait in line to stick their heads in the stocks; a man in 18th century garb is in line ahead of you at Wawa. And today that seemed especially true as I remembered that the God who entered this world in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago walks with us still--us, in all our latte-drinking, dog-walking, tourist-shooting, Santa-hugging, corporate-personhood-protesting glory...or lack thereof.

What I saw was ordinary people caught in ordinary moments, just like me. And that's the life the incarnate God makes holy. That's the un-lofty life God infuses with eternity.

Hope on a treadmill

It's been a rough couple of days. Without going into detail (professional boundaries, and all that sort of thing) it's been the kind of weekend that requires the support of good friends (thanks, guys), and Ben & Jerry's. Luckily, I've had both.

But while the Ben & Jerry's is necessary, it's also a very short term solution to life's problems. It's easy to sit there with your face firmly planted in a pint of Half Baked, consequences be damned, I don't care if I'm downing 1500 calories in one sitting or whether I'll feel sick later.

So the ice cream was only part of my approach. I also went running. That's not a new thing, of course, but that's kind of the point. In the midst of being sad, and physically and emotionally tired, I managed to stick to the marathon training schedule I started in July. This is a low week, schedule-wise, so it was only 3 miles. But still, I found some hope in that half hour on the treadmill.

(OK, it was a little more than half an hour. And it might have been the only time I've ever found hope on a treadmill. There was Great Dismal Swamp smoke outside, you see...)

Running, for me, felt a little bit like Jeremiah buying his field at Anathoth (Jer 32:1-15). The land was under siege, and property values had plummeted. It just wasn't a place you bought land anymore. But Jeremiah did. Buying that field was a way of showing he had faith in what the future would bring: that, as God told him, "houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land."

Things may be a little rough now, but I'm trying to have faith in what the future will bring. And running is a way of doing that. Even a 3 mile run is an investment. It says that in November, no matter what else, I'm going to run a race and I'm going to be proud of myself for it. Fields will be bought again in this land. There's good stuff to come. Let's get started now.

Nothing Like Me

When you work in a church--or, let's face it, when you are part of a church--there are inevitably a lot of times that you wish that everyone else in the church was just a little more like you. Thought a little more like you, had priorities a little more like yours. But then there are also times when you have to praise God that there are people in the church who are nothing like you, too.

Today and tomorrow our church is hosting Helping Hands, a mission mini-camp for 4th-6th graders. And today the group of kids from our church went to sing some hymns with the folks down in Respite. I thought this was great, because I love Respite and wanted the kids to love it too, but I was also a little nervous. I was worried that the kids would go, stare at the old people, sing a little, stare a little more at the old people, and leave. And that didn't seem like the point of a mission experience.

I was worried that it would be that way because that's what I would have done as a kid. I remember a Girl Scout trip or two to sing at a nursing home, and I was happy to sing, but I did not want to talk to anybody. For one thing, there is to this day nothing in the world I despise more than being told to "mingle." For another, I was scared of old people.

Having since gotten over my fear of the elderly (though not my fear of being made to mingle), I tried to pump the kids up. I told them why Respite was a special place for me and encouraged them to talk to the clients after we sang. So after our last hymn I said, "All right, go introduce yourself to someone!" and waited for the shy hesitation and embarrassed stares. I waited for them to respond like I would have.

But instead, the kids went right on up and introduced themselves. And they chatted with the old folks. And the old folks smiled and loved them.

And then we went back upstairs to the fellowship hall. We were the first group back from our mission projects. There were cards still on the tables--cards the kids had written and decorated as they had arrived at the church earlier, meant to be sent later to people at nursing homes.

But one girl said, "Hey, we should take these cards down to Respite."

So the kids picked out the best cards they could find and we turned around and went back to Respite, back to the old people, back to the world I never would have wanted to enter in the first place at their age. And they each found a client to give their card to, and some of them chatted a little more, and the old folks smiled and loved them.

Now that's what I call mission--not just singing a few nice songs, but reaching out in love and friendship to someone you wouldn't normally encounter or pay attention to. Those kids today didn't just follow my own hopeful/skeptical instructions to meet people. They went back. They took their call to mission to heart. I'm so glad they are part of the church--and that they are nothing like me.

Grace in the hard times

Tonight we had a small group for my Altar in the World study. This at first seemed like a slight disappointment, but I think it was actually a blessing. We had some of the best conversation we've had up to this point. The chapters we talked about tonight had to do with pain and how it can lead to spiritual growth, and the how and why of prayer. The people there had some really powerful stories to share relating to these chapters, things that might not have been shared in a larger group.

Their stories had to do with personal struggles and sickness and fear and the loss of loved ones. They are not my stories to tell, so that's all I will say. But I was humbled as I sat surrounded by these people who have been through so much more than I have and come through these struggles with grace, at least in retrospect. None, I am sure, are struggles that anyone would choose to go through again, but these people have become stronger, more faithful, and more grateful people through them. And when I shared some of my own experience wrestling with how to pray and what to expect from prayer, they had advice for me. Not know-it-all, obnoxiously certain advice, but helpful thoughts born and cultivated in the important experiences of their own lives.

So tonight I am thankful for people in my life who have gained wisdom through pain, and I am thankful for their willingness to share those stories so that we all might gain a little bit of that wisdom. I'm reminded of how much I have to learn spiritually from those who call me their pastor. And I hope that when I inevitably face struggles in my life harder than those I have encountered thus far, that I will be able to see--at least eventually--grace and growth in those times, too.

The compassion game

On the first Wednesday of every month, people from around Williamsburg come to see me, and I give them money. Sometimes it is money to help with rent, sometimes a few nights in a motel, sometimes making a dent in a power or water bill. Sometimes it is money for prescriptions or gas. I'm the one at church whose job it is to hear these needs and decide whether and how much help is appropriate.

I've written and talked a lot at church about how hard this part of my job is. I never know whether I'm being stingy or gullible and mostly end up feeling both at the same time. I see a lot of the same people from month to month and am acutely aware of how little difference this money actually makes, at least most of the time, and how powerless the church and I are to actually make that difference. Sometimes I think--though most of the people I see would probably disagree--that the most important part of this job is the fact that it makes and allows me to listen to people. I hear stories from parts of the community that I don't hear on Sunday mornings or evening Bible studies. And I get to put a face to the fact that the church cares about helping its neighbors, whether or not we can do much.

Every once in a while I meet someone who thinks that, too. They will thank me not only for the check I hand them but also for listening to them. "I've been everywhere," they've said, "and no one else has listened to me." I feel good when people tell me this. It makes me feel like what I am doing is ministry. It makes me feel like I have succeeded in treating my neighbor with dignity, as a child of God. Sometimes it also makes me selfishly feel like we're doing better at that here than whatever other church they were at last.

But I know also that it probably works the other way around. When the budget has run out for the month, when someone's come back for the third month in a row and I have to tell them no, when I have to tell them no for any reason, I'm sure they must find another church, and another pastor to sit down with, and they must sometimes say, "Thank you for listening to me. I've been everywhere, and no one else has listened to me." And by no one else, they will mean me. Maybe what they mean is I didn't give them what they wanted. But maybe they really mean that I somehow failed to see them in the process, too. From the point of view of someone in need, those two things must blend together.

Ministry is so imperfect. I remind myself of Bonhoeffer's view of ethics, how not to do anything for fear of sinning is really the worst sin of all. I hope in the end, I've listened to more people than I haven't. And I hope that when I haven't, someone else will have--money or no money--at the church down the street or somewhere else in this community.