Crosslines Food Pantry Ministry

The Springfield Cumberland Presbyterian Church provides food and volunteer time to Crosslines on a regular basis. Crosslines is a ministry of the Council of Churches in Springfield, MO. Each weekday of the month, a different church volunteers for a day. First Monday, Third Tuesday, Second Wednesday, etc and that is the day they take enough food to the pantry to feed about 50 families or so each month. The volunteer church of the day fills bags of food for the people who come into Crosslines in need.

Small churches, that do not have the resources to fill the pantry each month, take fifth weekdays, which come about once a quarter. That is what our church does. When they first volunteered many years ago, the membership of the church was in the 20's and 30's and they did not have the resources to do more. We are still small and once a quarter is do-able. Our day is the 5th Wednesday and our next Crosslines day is in March.

A person (not in their church), a regular volunteer, takes the applications of the people wanting food and determines if they are eligible under government guidelines. There is not enough food for every person in town who doesn't feel like shopping to go in and get free food so there have to be guidelines. Almost everybody who goes there is eligible.

The volunteer church of the day is to give the person needing food enough for at least 3 days for the number of people in their household. A family of 10 gets a lot more food than a single person.

When I was the volunteer who took the applications, I saw that the majority of people needing help had physical and psychological problems and many were on disability. I loved the little lady in her 80's who had surgery and could barely walk. She was determined, when she got her strength back, she was going to get a job and not have to ask for help.

One lady had just learned she had a brain tumor and had just adopted another family member's children due to some issues. Her children and the additional children gave her quite a crew to look after.

One younger man, in his 30's, looked very healthy and hearty, but when he lifted up his shirt, he had stitches healing all the way down from recent open heart surgery. (Some of our volunteer churches send only elderly people who refuse to help people load the groceries they give. They do not have the ability.Where are the healthy younger volunteers with big hearts to help those who are doing the best they can but can't quite do it all?)

There was the family with the little boy who was dying of cancer. It was his birthday and they thought it would be his last. Our people, since it happened on the day our church was filling the pantry, went to the store and bought him a special cake and other things.

Some of the people who come for food were special students in school. They were not born with the ability to do as much. Those individuals tended to be working part time at low paying jobs and just having trouble making ends meet.

A few of the people coming in would be college students who were on their own and having trouble making ends meet while they were in school, particularly if they had children. These students were mainly those who had no family support and were trying to do better than their families of birth had done. I respect that.

Some of the people who came in were elderly. The checks they got did not cover their expenses. Sometimes other family members who lost jobs or had health issues, or even children whose families were dysfunctional were living with them. The older generation is very much geared toward taking care of your own from what I saw, even though it was a hardship on them. The other major reason they needed help was the cost of prescription medications prescribed but not covered by any plan and expensive.

We had many people who got laid off and were out of work but looking. That's a temporary thing for them, but painful.

It bothered me the number of people who had been in the service who were having trouble finding employment. These were people with good educations and excellent skills. I'm not sure why employers shy away from them, but many do. One young family came in and the dad had been a helicopter pilot in the military months before. He told me about his struggles to find a job, any job. I think he had been in combat too. He should be honored, not shunned. They were planning to move to another part of the country to look for work.

There are many people who live on the edge, we call them the working poor, who are financially wiped out if they have car trouble or medical problems. They are hard working people who get discouraged.

There are so many more stories, everybody has a story. If you go to our church and you are reading this, be assured everything you give to our food pantry goes to those in need and God will bless you for your generosity. Remember what Jesus said, when you do (or don't do) something for the least of these, you do (or don't do) it for Him. (It might be worth a glance at the second half of Matt 25;31ff. Modern pastors like to read the first half of the passage and neglect the second.)