The people here in McMinnville, Oregon, our new home since September, do an amazing job feeding the hungry. Four evenings a week the Episcopal Church, St. Barnabus, serves dinner. Other days are covered by other churches in town. Typically, each meal serves about 300-350 people, including take-out meals. The annual total at St. Barnabus is very close to the population of this city, 33,000. The need is high, even here in Oregon where the economy seems to be so much healthier than West Virginia where we had been living.
Imagine my reaction when our tour in India included a Sikh Temple. After receiving head coverings
and removing our shoes,
we wandered around admiring the architecture, bathing pool,
and listening to the chanting, which had tonations that reminded me of Torah chanting. (Something to look into, as the Sikh religion is about 500 years old and when the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE the people moved west into Europe and east into Asia…would be an interesting study to understand the influences of how the Sikh religion started.)
Then Arvind lead us into the soup kitchen and we learned they feed the hungry three meals a day, a total of 22,000 people each and every day. 
We saw volunteers chopping vegetables 
baking the chapati 
to serve with the vegetable curry simmering in huge vats. 
Don’t get hung up on the fact that this work is done on the floor; yesterday’s blog should have brought you up to speed that the concept of sanitation is very different in India. Focus, instead, on the service being done. Pretty amazing.
goingplaceslivinglife 