At last night’s meeting of the church’s board, Bill asked if any of us could help out in the soup kitchen the next morning (which is to say, this morning). First Unitarian sends a crew to make lunch on the third Wednesday of every month, but two of the five regulars were away on vacation, another two were down with some kind of virus, and one of the two replacements Bill had recruited to fill in had called to say she was sick.

Of course, most of the people at the Board meeting either had to go to work, or had already made other plans. But Maggi said she’d come right at nine to prepare food. I said I’d show up at nine thirty to help out, and I called Carol to see if she would be free — she was, and Bill had most of his crew.

This to me is one of the signs of a healthy congregation:– when something goes wrong, and you need volunteers at the last minute, enough people step forward to take care of whatever commitment needs to be taken care of. I don’t base this on any grand theory; all I know is that when this happens, the church feels like a real community to me.

By the time Carol and I showed up at nine-thirty, Bill, Maggi, and Maryellen (who had felt better and showed up to work) had already made most of the sandwiches and made up the desserts. Bill said Maggi and Maryellen couldn’t stay to serve the food, so Carol and I slipped home and worked for a couple of hours (fortunately, we both had flexible schedules today), and went back at eleven thirty to help serve lunch. There were a lot of people to serve. Bill said they usually serve 150 people on the third Wednesday, but today we served about 190, including some families with children. By noon, Bill was madly making more sandwiches while Carol and I served people. Finally, we ran out of sandwich meat and had to serve bread and butter. At least it was something to eat.

My carefully planned work schedule for today was completely disrupted. But sometimes volunteer work really is more important than anything else.