Convergint Day

This post has absolutely nothing to do with weight loss, exercise,  or eating right. But if your looking for your mind to be fed and your heart to be stuffed full of love,  then I encourage you to continue reading.

My family (minus our boy) spent last Friday serving others through volunteer work in our community. 

My sweetheart works for a company named Convergint Technologies. This North American company specializes in "security integration" which is a fancy term to define a group of folks that work with security cameras, card access systems, fire alarms, etc. Dating back to the inception of the company over a decade ago, one of the dynamic opportunities that is offered is that the owners of the company encourage each employee including management to spend at least 1 day of the year giving back to the community. They chose this past Friday, June 7th as the day to shut down operations of the entire company so that any and all could participate. 

We started our morning at the Churches of Christ Disaster Relief Center. Watching the group pack boxes of canned goods (vienna sausages to be exact) and buckets of cleaning supplies was delightful. We all worked as a strong team and managed to pack over 2,700 cans (900 boxes) of viennas and 72 cleaning buckets.



The Cleaning Team



The Bucket



The Sausage Crew

After the morning work was finished, we made our way back to the office to enjoy pizza before heading out to the next opportunity. Katie (my baby girl) agreed to pose with her silly mom so here ya' go...

Following our lunch break, we made our way to East Nashville to serve at Loaves and Fishes.

After spending a couple of hours there loving on people and handing out loads of food products, one could not help but feel thankful for opportunities to serve like this one. I helped at the bread and pastry station. No pressure there...hahaha! Those amazing looking cakes and donuts didn't tempt me but the fresh garlic bread was smelling up the place nice with the baking sun. Oh goodness, there is nothing harder to pass up for me!  In talking with one of the organizers from the Catholic Charities Refugees Services (Becky), she mentioned a book that I might really appreciate after Friday's experience. Same Kind of Different As Me will be on my TO READ list :) Another really neat thing that Becky shared with me during our conversation was that she sees need in a whole new light after serving in the community. She said, "Alcoholism and drug addiction is the branch, not the root." How very true that is! That makes total sense when you think that you have "cured" the problem like addiction but you really need to get to the root of why the addiction started.



Our girls



More little helpers


All walks of life came through the lines to gather bags upon bags and boxes of groceries that were provided by Second Harvest Food Bank. Come to find out, these folks start standing in lineas early as 8am on the 1st Friday of every month in hopes of getting first pick of the goods as the gates open at 1pm.

  



One of our shoppers...balanced it all on her head as she left the gate headed back home




Breaktime...just wanted a banana



Thankful Mom

 So this gnarly crew stopped to pose after the day spent serving others in our community. From standing on concrete floors in the wharehouse to standing in the sun and pop-up rain in East Nashville, the day was filled with opportunities to get frustrated and tired. The best part is that no one complained about the circumstances as we were able to watch the smiling faces pass through the line and out the back gate headed to their homes...or back to the streets.

I can't express in words how grateful I am to have had the day off from my regular job only to enjoy time with others. The circumstances are heart breaking but seeing the impact of giving a few hours of our time definitely brought the sun from behind the clouds by the end of the day for many of us.