Give to Everyone Who Begs from You

There are certain aspects of the Sunday worship service at my church that are the same each week, down to the exact phrasing that my pastor uses. For that reason I’ve described it as “liturgical” before, although it’s not a liturgy that we use, necessarily.

One of those phrases that we hear each week as the service ends is an instruction that goes something like this: “The Bible reminds us to be careful of how we entertain strangers, for some of us have entertained angels unaware.” My pastor is referencing Hebrews 13:2 each week, and that reminder has often resonated in my head as I’ve encountered people on the street asking for something—change, food, a SEPTA token. As I walk away with my money still in my wallet, I have thought a couple of times, “What if that was an angel?” Jesus himself said that when we feed the hungry, give a drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked we are actually doing those things to him as well. So I’ve thought before, “I just denied Jesus a couple of dollars!”

I bring up these thoughts because of a discussion we had at our Wednesday night Bible study this week. In a conversation about living your faith out in works, the topic of giving money to panhandlers came up as such an opportunity to “prove” your faith. The discussion went all over the place, with many people having stories to tell about how they’ve handled the situation so familiar to all of us. Some had given out $20 bills and others advice such as “Get as job” (a response to which I have not the time to deliver here). The clearest answer I came out with was “Do as you feel led in the moment, considering the Bible’s strong bend toward generosity.” It was a reasonable answer that left room for “discernment,” a word that came up several times during the discussion.

But this morning I was reminded of a striking instruction from Jesus during his famous Sermon on the Mount as recorded by Luke: “Give to everyone who begs from you…” So simple. If someone begs from you, give them something. This was such a freeing command. Just give.

Of course there is the consideration of what to give, which Jesus does not address. And I agree with Jesus that it doesn’t need addressing. We are to give. To everyone who begs from us.

So as I learn about how to practice simplicity, I’ve decided that I’ll not be caught unprepared any more. I will have things on hand to give, mainly granola bars and SEPTA tokens since I’m usually asked for food or “money for the bus.” I’m commanded to give and I’m confronted with opportunities all the time, so I’ll not leave any more angels with empty hands, and I’ll certainly not leave Jesus with an empty belly. I’ll give.

My Kind of Folk (Guest Blogger)

by guest blogger Sophilia Hubbard of the Southwest Philly Mission Year team:

Why do I need to spend time with folk who are already saved? They already know what they know. I love spending time with people who are rebels. People who don't understand their potential and true value in Christ. I love hanging out with nobodies, people who have no sense of direction. Ordinary people, human beings, with character good or bad that society has written off. Yeah those are my kind of folk. 

Today I met a real cool cat. His name is Lawrence. Lawrence, like everyone else has a past. His past is one of a lot of hardship. An attribute that struck me in a momentary state of shock was the stories in which he shared with me. Lawrence has a passion for helping people that is rare in today's American culture. The stories he shared with me a total complete and utter stranger; if I was Lawrence I wouldn't trust anyone nor talk to anyone. If I went through half the situations he went through I would be muted.... permanently. Lawrence thank you for the encouragement. 

God thank you for all of the rich opportunities and encounters that I have daily to smile and listen to others. I pray for the nobodies of the world like me. I pray as well for the folk who are already saved who know what they know. Thank you Jesus for who you are! Thank you Jesus for constantly molding and influencing me to positively impact communities. 

Quote: 

"I am constantly blown away by the opportunities that God lays in front of us to learn how to love and to be loved."  -William Owen 

Learn more about Sophie here.

Contact Guest Blogger

blissfulsmh09@gmail.com

Mission Year Meals: Thursday

Thursday is the last day of our grocery week! Sophie and I made taco pie. Although normally we take food to our weekly Thursday night citywide gathering, this weekend was actually “Come and See,” a time when family and friends were invited to visit our home and taste the Mission Year life. But this week we had Thursday night to welcome our guests arriving into town. The taco pie recipe is one shared with me by my sister, a source of many of my recipes. Here it is:

Taco Pie

1 lb. ground beef

1 ½ c. chopped onion

1 pkg taco seasoning

4 oz can chopped green chiles, drained

½ c. Bisquick mix

½ c. shredded sharp cheddar cheese

Brown the beef and onions together; drain. Stir in taco seasoning; place in sprayed 9” pie pan and top with chilies. Blend Bisquick, milk, and egg together and pour over beef slowly. Bake 25 min at 400, or until done. Sprinkle with cheese and continue baking until cheese is melted.

We are also serving it with salad and sour cream on the side. Those ingredients:

1 head of lettuce

A few tomatoes

Cucumber

Carrot shavings

Sour cream

We usually doctor meals a little bit to our liking. In this meal, we used more than one pound of beef (to feed more mouths) and increased the amount of bread topping and cheese. Although you can’t tell from this week’s menu, we don’t usually eat much cheese, so when we do eat cheese we indulge ourselves. So instead of just sprinkling cheese on top, I also sprinkled a layer between the beef and bisquick topping.

Ground beef is actually one of our staple meat ingredients. We usually buy the 5 lb. tube and use it for several meals. We don’t usually buy it for just one meal as we did this week, but it was on sale, so we snatched it up in anticipation of meals next week. We don’t always have room in the budget to plan ahead, but when we do, we take advantage of it!

COST:

Ground Beef $9.95 (An investment for next week too!)

Jalapenos (instead of chilles) $0.14

Baking Mix (off-brand bisquick) $2.49

Block of Sharp Cheddar Cheese $1.99

Sour Cream $1.49

Other Ingredients on hand: onion, taco seasoning, and veggies from the general/lunch/breakfast budget

TOTAL: $10.00

So there you have it! Six meals, all under $10.00! It can be done, and it is done every week in my house. 

Mission Year Meals: Wednesday

Denise cooked on Wednesday! It was a yummy black bean dish. Denise likes to cook with black beans. She also makes a tasty black bean burger that we have had a couple of times due to popular demand. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients: (Serving size 6-8)

• 1 lb. ground extra lean turkey 
• 1/2 chopped onion
• 1 jalapeno pepper, seeds and ribs removed, diced
• 1 red pepper, chopped
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• 1/4 tsp ground red pepper flakes
• 5 garlic cloves, minced
• 2/3 cup low-sodium chicken broth
• 3 (15 oz) cans black beans, rinsed and drained
• 1-2 chopped seeded tomatoes
• 1 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 425F.
2. Heat a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add ground turkey and a handful of the onions to the pan, sauteing until meat is browned. Remove turkey and set aside.
3. Coat pan with cooking spray. Add onion, pepper, and jalapeno, sauteing for 4 minutes and stirring occasionally. Add salt, cumin, red pepper, and garlic. Saute for 1 minute, stirring constantly.
4. Stir in broth and black beans. Bring mixture to a boil and cook for 5 minutes. Mash beans to desired consistency.
5. Spoon mixture into an 9x13 (or to another extra pan if you do not want it thick) baking dish coated with cooking spray. Top with turkey, bacon, tomato, and cheese. Bake at 425F for 30 minutes or until lightly browned. Top with green onions and let cool for at least 10 minutes (otherwise it will be too runny).
6. Serve with sour cream, tortilla chips, on tacos, on a salad, or just eat it plain!

Cost Breakdown:

Ground Turkey (a luxury item that we get occasionally) $3.59

1 Jalapeno $0.28

1 Red Pepper $1.00

3 cans Black Beans $1.77

Roma Tomatoes $2.23 (but some of these were used for salad and sandwiches)

Mozzarella Cheese block (instead of Monterrey Jack) $1.99

Ingredients we had on hand: Onion, fresh garlic, spices, chicken broth

COST: $10.00

Sometimes it's nice to have a vegetarian meal (or at least the option for one), so Denise made one pan with ground turkey and one small pan without it. She served it with a fresh salad. Since we all keep salads as an option for our meals, that's a cost that comes out of our general/breakfast/lunch budget of about $50.00. 

Mission Year Meals: Tuesday

Tuesday was a long day for me at my service site, spending a couple of long hours with energetic yet unenthusiastic middle schoolers. Although it was rough getting home late, my team welcomed me with wide smiles, open ears, and comfort food: grilled cheese and tomato soup!

Walter was the head chef with Priscillia assisting. Although these low-cost food items may seem simple enough, Walter jazzed them up with suggestions from his sister. His recipe:

6 cans tomato soup

2 cups milk

4 cups water

Pepper, sugar, salt, basil to taste

Combine all ingredients in a large pot. Heat and stir for a while. Serve hot.

The grilled cheese was what you would imagine, although they used oil to grill them in a pan when the supply of butter began to run low.

COST:

Tomato soup (6 cans) $3.00

Loaf of wheat bread $1.49

American cheese singles $1.99

Imitation cheese singles (what we affectionately refer to as “feeze,” short for “fake cheese”) $0.99

One gallon of milk is $4.00, but that comes out of our breakfast budget.

Other ingredients on hand: water, spices

TOTAL: $7.50

Mission Year Meals: Monday

Today is Nicole’s night to cook, and we’re having Italian! Here’s the link to the recipe she found on La Cucina Italiana: Fettuccine with Lemon and Peas. Like most of our meals, she modified it to fit our needs, mostly in ways that she didn’t anticipate.

When we send out our grocery shopping team each week, we trust them to make decisions about what to buy and what not to buy and how to save money. For example, if the store doesn't have an ingredient that we need or it’s too expensive, then the grocery team is responsible for figuring out what to do instead. And we trust each other to do that.

That happened a couple of times with Nicole’s meal. The first time was with her pasta. We wondered how much to buy. She had mentioned one pound, and that was one box. It didn’t seem like enough for all of us, but we trusted the list and saved a little money by buying just one box of pasta.

Then we got to the lemons, obviously a key ingredient for this recipe. The list requested three, but we thought that was too expensive considering we already had lemon juice at home. So we got one instead.

When Nicole went to make her meal, she too was surprised at how little pasta was in a one-pound box. And she was surprised to have just one lemon. The lemons were for zesting, not for juicing as we thought!

So to make the recipe work, she cooked some potatoes and threw them in with the pasta. Then she juiced the lemon instead of zesting it.

But apparently juice didn’t do for the sauce what zest would have done, and it tasted horrible. To rescue the sauce, she added sugar and salt and a few other spices.

She proceeded with the meal and served it to us wondering if it would be enough food and if we would like it. We all dished it up and tried it, not knowing that she had made so many modifications to her recipe. We all expressed how tasty it was, not just out of respect for the cook but because it really was yummy! Nicole sighed and giggled and told us about all that went into the meal and we appreciated it even more.

The cost breakdown:

Bag of frozen peas $1.19

1 lb. box of fettuccine pasta $0.99

Heavy whipping cream $1.99

Potatoes (10 lb. bag, used for other meals) $3.49

Lemon $0.63

Other ingredients we didn't have to purchase: Salt, butter, pepper

TOTAL: $8.50

Mission Year Meals: Super Bowl Sunday

Today is a little bit different from most days because it’s Super Bowl Sunday! You may remember that we don’t have a television in our house. For that reason we went to our pastor’s house to watch the game with his family. So we didn’t have to cook! But we did bring a dip over and some cupcakes over to their house. So here are the recipes we used for Sunday and the meal breakdown.

Cheese Dip

1 block (1 lb.) of Velveeta cheese

1 pound of sausage

1 can of tomatoes with green chilies

1 can of cream of mushroom soup

Brown the sausage. Combine all ingredients in a crock pot and cook it on high for one hour.

The cupcakes we took to the party were sent in a care package! We get care packages fairly often, and this week three of us got packages at one time, so we took the cupcakes to the party to share our fresh-baked bounty. The benefactor of the cupcakes also sent powdered sugar to make frosting for the cupcakes, so I made cream cheese frosting, too. Here’s the recipe:

Cream Cheese Icing

3 cups powdered sugar

1 package cream cheese

1 stick of butter

½ t. vanilla

Combine ingredients and mix until creamy.

Red velvet cupcakes in a football formation!

Here’s the cost breakdown of Sunday’s groceries:

Cream Cheese $1.49

Sausage $2.29

Velveeta Cheese (off-brand “Marvella”) $4.99

Can of tomatoes with green chilies $.63

The other items we already had: cream of mushroom soup, powdered sugar, butter, vanilla

TOTAL: $9.50

Today’s meals demonstrate an important aspect of our lives: other people looking out for us. Our friends love to provide for us, and we always have enough. Sometimes we have abundance! As noted above, we receive a few care packages throughout each month. We also have friends in the city—neighbors, co-workers, church friends—that invite us over to parties, take us out to lunch, or bring us fruit. So thanks to everyone who cares for us. We would get by without you, but it makes it easier to have you helping out!

Mission Year Meals: Saturday

Saturday is the night we host our community dinner. We invite neighbors, friends from church, co-workers, or some combination of those to come to our house and share a meal. It’s out biggest meal of the week, so we sometimes have to get creative about how to make our money go farther. This week, though, we hosted our next-door neighbors, an older couple that look out for us and chat with us on the porch regularly. They were the first people we met in the neighborhood, so we’ve been trying to have them over since then! Finally we had them over to enjoy a meal with us.

On the menu: White Cheese and Chicken Lasagna!

Head Chef: Priscillia.

Sous Chef: Walter Levi

Check out the recipe here!

Actually this week we were a little ahead of the game, buying some of the ingredients last week, including the lasagna noodles, chicken broth, some of the cheese, and spinach.

Here’s the cost break-down:

One block of mozzarella cheese $1.99

Boneless, Skinless Chicken $5.98

Italian Bread $1.99

We have on hand many of the ingredients necessary for the recipe: onions, garlic, flour, milk, and spices.

In addition, our neighbors brought over a salad and dessert to complement our lasagna.

TOTAL: $10.00

Saturday’s meal is the most difficult to keep in budget, but with generosity from our neighbors and a little bit of planning ahead, we enjoyed a tasty meal and delightful conversation about our neighborhood, encountering critters in the city, home remedies for sickness, and Catholic traditions, with plans penciled in to visit mass at our neighbors’ parish.

Mission Year Meals: The Grocery List

Many of my friends were intrigued (or should I say shocked?) that my daily food budget is a little more than $2.00 a day, which totals to $117 for my team for the week. Some of you don’t believe that we actually eat enough to survive. This is the first in a series of posts this week to prove to you that we are not only surviving but thriving with plenty to eat and actually hosting guests for dinner once a week!

Early on we established a system for feeding ourselves that has endured until now. For some context to this conversation, here’s our system:

• Everyone is on their own each day for breakfast and lunch.
• For dinner, we are divided into pairs that plan and cook two meals each week, with everyone taking point on one meal a week.
• Every month we switch pairs and switch nights of the week, so that we cook with different people on different days.
• For example, this month I cook with Sophie on Sundays and Thursdays. If we decide that she will take point on Sundays, then I take point on Thursdays, providing the recipe and leadership in the meal preparation.
• We eat together for dinner whenever we can, which is most days, but we always eat together on Family Dinner night, which right now is Mondays.
• On Saturdays, we host a Community Dinner, inviting neighbors and friends from work or church.
• On Fridays, our Sabbath days, no one cooks.
• The pair that cooked the night before does dishes. On Saturday, the Thursday cooking team does dishes.

Now here are some of our operational systems for buying groceries:

• Each week on Saturday morning we create a grocery list, naming items we need for breakfast, lunch, and for each dinner.
• We allot ten dollars for each dinner, leaving about $50 for lunch and breakfast for the week.
• A group of three or four of us goes shopping and the rest of us stay behind to clean the house.

 

The grocery store we frequent is Save-a-Lot, a discount store that carries few name-brand items and has a somewhat limited selection. It’s about five blocks away (depending on how you count blocks), and we usually walk, although there is a bus that goes straight from our block to the store.

We’ve pretty well mastered the layout of the store, and it doesn’t take long for us to fill our cart with the items we seek. We record the cost of each item as we pick it up, and at the end of our spree we add it up and make sure it’s within our budget of $117. Usually it is, but sometimes we have to make hard decisions about what to put back to stay within the budget. 

For example, this week we didn't buy much meat, but we had a lot of dairy products on our list. When we counted up the costs, we were initially at $121. We talked through what we could put back, and ended up getting blocks of cheese instead of bags of shredded cheese, and traded one pack of sliced American cheese for imitation. We also considered putting back the ground turkey in favor of ground beef, but our cheese compromises saved us enough to stay at $115.

Starting on Saturday, I will post our individual dinner meals, sharing recipes and cost-saving ingredients. Each day’s post will be about what we ate exactly one week earlier, so don’t get confused when I reference a Super Bowl party on Sunday! I hope you enjoy this series—it has been fun so far to make it. And hopefully the doubters will believe that we eat and eat well--with just $117!