It’s not the pay and it’s certainly not the great hours. So what motivates Faye Gable to spend long, hot days preparing and serving meals to thousands of disaster victims? “God’s Word tells me we serve Jesus our Lord by serving our fellow man. I enjoy it. I just enjoy serving people,” was her answer.
Gable and her husband, Aubra, members of Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, Cullman, have volunteered their time with feeding teams after several disasters. And by Sept. 11, they were on the road again to Slidell, La., a community just north of Lake Pontchartrain hit by Hurricane Katrina. There they were part of a nine-member feeding team from East Cullman Baptist Association that spent a week working alongside volunteers from Virginia and Tennessee in a Virginia feeding unit housed at Grace Memorial Baptist Church, Slidell.
For the feeding team, the day begins around 4:15 a.m. with the preparation of breakfast for the chain saw and cleanup crews and other volunteers. By 7 a.m., the team is already preparing lunch so the food can be loaded onto American Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicles (ERVs) and taken out into the community.
Shortly after the ERVs leave around 9 or 10 a.m., the crew prepares to serve lunch for two hours on-site to disaster victims who walk or drive up, along with the other volunteers. After lunch and cleanup, the process begins all over again with dinner preparation, reloading the ERVs with a second meal and staffing another serving line. Then it’s time for a devotional, a quick shower in the on-site shower trailer and, on a good day, a 10:30 p.m. bedtime. The next day, it starts all over again. It makes for a grueling, but rewarding, week of work.
It’s not unusual for feeding teams to prepare 10,000 meals a day, the majority of which are taken into the community on the ERVs. Usually Baptist disaster relief volunteers don’t get to see that part of their ministry. They are too busy to leave the church parking lot from which the feeding unit is operating. But in Slidell, Aubra Gable had the opportunity to accompany several Red Cross volunteers in an ERV and see the thankful faces of people for whom receiving a hot meal is the highlight of their day.
“It was rewarding to me to see how the food we fix here is distributed and how these people (Red Cross volunteers) who take it out are concerned about reaching everyone who needs a meal,” Aubra Gable said. “We don’t want anybody hungry in this area.”
The next day, Carl Traver, a volunteer from Redan Baptist Church, Holly Pond, had the same chance.
“I help prepare the food at the church — I opened probably 10,000 cans in the last week or so — so I really enjoyed getting out here and seeing where it’s going,” he said.
Other volunteers, like Osmar Morris, work tirelessly in the background, making sure various needs are met.
Morris, a member of Lake Catoma Baptist Church, Cullman, had a management position in the food industry for 20 years. Now retired, he applies that experience to disaster relief. In Slidell, Morris oversaw the inventory, making sure the cooking crews always had what they needed.
His motivation to serve comes from deep within. “As we think about what Christ did for us, then you want to do something for somebody else,” he said. “As you see the hearts and lives of people who are touched through this type of service, then it gives you a desire to do more to try to meet their needs. It’s really touching when you hear people come up and say, ‘I’ll take anything you have. I don’t have any food.’”
Morris knows the ministry could not take place without the work of many people and the support of the Cooperative Program. “As churches cooperate together, the Lord takes it and uses it, and you just can’t explain what all it does. It’s a massive tool.”
Cooking beans, stirring stew, mixing tea, serving meals, washing pots, taking inventory — it’s all a part of the job when you’re on a feeding team. It’s hard work but worth it to folks like Faye Gable, who said, “I have people tell me, ‘If I was going to work, I’d work for money,’ but this is worth more than money can buy.”
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