By Grace Thornton
Correspondent, The Alabama Baptist
She was someone who’d been walking through the doors of Washington Baptist Association for quite a while, Mildred Butler said — the kind of person you read stories about in the newspaper.
“You could tell she’d lived a rough life,” Butler said of the local woman who came to pick up a bag of food provided monthly by the association.
But one day she pushed open the door and Butler didn’t recognize her.
“She told me who she was and I couldn’t believe it was her,” she said. “She said she’d gotten saved. I’d never seen anyone with that much change in appearance before — it was night to day. And it just amazed me.”
It “lifts you up” when that happens, said Butler, who serves on staff at Washington Association and acts as point person for the distribution ministry.
As people have come in for bags of food over the years, she has had several let her know as they’ve found Christ or gotten back in church, she said.
It’s amazing the difference a food ministry can make in meeting the community’s physical and spiritual needs, said Larry Thompson, director of missions for Washington Association.
“We started maybe eight years ago and at that point somewhere between 15 and 20 individuals were coming in to get food,” he said. “Now we’re over 350 bags a month.”
For those who qualify, food bags are available on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8 a.m. to noon, except for the second Tuesday of the month — that’s when the truck from the Food Bank in Mobile delivers the next month’s worth of food.
The money to purchase the food comes from churches and individuals in the county, he said, as well as assistance from the Alabama Hunger Offering for Global Hunger Relief provided through the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions.
And Butler said a lot of people will collect food and bring it in during world hunger emphases or around the holidays. “It really helps,” she said.
In the past year, the association gave out more than 3,700 bags of groceries, Butler said.
“We’ve got a lot of volunteers who help us give the food out,” said Butler, noting that it would be nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of work with only her and Thompson as the paid staff of the associational office.
The need for food assistance in the area is deep — deeper than Butler originally thought they would be able to handle.
But God has always brought exactly what they needed, she said.
“Since the beginning, I thought, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to do this financially,’” she said. “But God supplies. He has always supplied.”
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