Andrew Plus: Imagine, if you dare

Andrew Plus: Imagine, if you dare

Softball player carried by opponents to win

The amazing story of a softball player who hit her first homerun and was carried home to score by her opponents.

Bakers On Wheels

Minge Pointer, the director of and force behind Bakers On Wheels, is a Christian with physical and mental disabilities which preclude her from working full-time, or outside the home, or according to a set schedule. Yet the desire to advance Jesus’ message and to exercise her mind and body remains.
The idea of Bakers On Wheels came after Minge awoke from a month-long coma, glad to be alive but with limited physical movement and control. The mental and physical steps required to bake bread helped her initially to regain mobility, and to maintain it.

Bread, being a symbol in the church, and a staple needed for human existence, makes a wonderful tool for her purposes -- to spread God’s love and provide an outlet for handicapped adults to keep their bodies and minds active.

Read all about this ministry here.

Eleven year old feeding the hungry

As a fifth-grader, Jack Davis learned about how government works, even drafting pretend legislation in his social studies class.
A year later, 11-year-old Jack is pressing for a real law -- one that could help feed Florida's homeless.

The sixth-grader is being credited for inspiring a bill that will allow restaurants and hotels to donate leftover food to places like homeless shelters and not face legal liabilities.

For years, many eateries and other places have simply thrown the food away, rather than face a lawsuit if someone got sick.

"I kind of used my social studies teacher's advice," said Jack, a sixth-grader at Ransom Everglades School. "She told us to make a difference."

His fifth-grade social studies teacher is delighted Jack took her lesson to heart.

"I pretty much want all my students to be as much as they can be and to go for it," said Deborah Rogero, a fifth-grade teacher at Saint Thomas Episcopal Parish in Coral Gables. "It's their responsibility to make the world a better place."


Read it all here.

Church gives a "hand up"

MOSES LAKE - When she spoke before the congregation of St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Mavis Barnett felt like she was floating on a cloud.

Barnett, community service coordinator at the North Columbia Community Action Council, was there to thank the church congregation for participating in the council's program to adopt homeless and low-income families.

"I spoke to them, I thanked them for everything and talked about how good God is," Barnett noted. "I thanked them for allowing God to work through them to help these people, and I felt like they were all guardian angels God had sent to take care of these people who couldn't take care of themselves."

Read it all here

Giving a little or a latte

From Episcopal Cafe:

At the Starbucks on 116th Street NE in Marysville, Washington, a chain of more than 350 people bought coffee for the people in line behind them -- either in the drive-through or inside -- starting with a woman who first came in about 8 a.m.


During the holidays, it's not uncommon for customers to occasionally buy coffee for whomever is next in line, said Nix, who used to work at the Starbucks in Lake Stevens.

But she's never seen anything like this.

"I'm really shocked," Nix said. "This makes Christmas so much nicer, knowing people care."

Some customers went above and beyond paying for the next person, giving $15 or $20 to the coffee shop. Any extra money that isn't used to pay for drinks is planned to be used for Starbucks' holiday toy drive, Nix said.

But it didn't stop there: "By Thursday afternoon, a chain of more than 813 customers had bought drinks for the next person in line at the Starbucks on 116th Street NE. The woman started the chain when she bought her regular iced tea Wednesday morning."

Room at the inn

The New Jersey Star Ledger reports on how one Episcopal priest started a homeless shelter in Monclair, NJ - one of the wealthier suburbs of the US.

"You have experienced doors being shut, is that right?" he asked the congregation last month at House of Prayer in Newark, where he is interim pastor. "Doors we thought we should have been able to go into and journey in this direction or that. Only to find another door was opened, and we stepped into that door and realized God opened it for us, and those doors have lead us to where we are today."

The doors through which the 72-year-old Renn walked on his way to Montclair and MESH include ones at Boeing, where he worked as an engineer after getting bachelor's and master's degrees in physics. Another door lead to his work as a missionary in Zimbabwe for six years. Another to Nutley, where he served as pastor of Grace Episcopal Church for 23 years.

But of all the doors Renn has walked though, perhaps the most important was the one he passed through almost a year ago; the one that took him into the bitter cold. The one that made him think: Someone is going to freeze to death.

Last January, as the temperature dropped, Renn's anxiety rose.

Each day, as he felt the wind sharpen, he found himself fearing the same thing -- that some homeless person would freeze to death huddled outside a building in Montclair, where he lived.

'I'll be right up front: My anxiety was for the township of Montclair. What a shame, what a blot for Montclair" if that happened, he said.

And then he had another thought.

"We can't let that happen."

Montclair is a splendid town, with good schools and tree-lined streets of center-hall Colonials. But behind some of those windows, and behind some of its buildings, the story is no different than in many American towns and cities.

Every day a free meal is offered in Montclair, and every day 40 to 60 people sit down to lunch, most of them residents who have difficulty making ends meet. Among them are 10 to 15 homeless men and women who avoid the Newark shelters out of fear of violence or theft. Instead, they spend their nights curled up on roofs, huddled next to buildings or wedged in some small space that blocks the wind.

Fifteen homeless adults in a town of 37,000 residents may not seem like a lot, but what if one froze to death, as seemed increasingly likely to Renn last January. What would that say about a community with so much affluence?

Read it all here