The Food Bank of North Alabama serves 11 Counties, Colbert, Cullman, DeKalb, Franklin, Jackson, Lauderdale, Lawrence, Limestone, Madison, Marshall and Morgan. The mission of the food bank is to feed the hungry today and create solutions that will end hunger tomorrow. According to the food bank studies, one in every 7 people struggle with hunger and one in every 4 children struggle with hunger as well. The Food Bank supplies 8 million pounds of food a year to a network of over 240 food pantries, shelters and children,s  programs in 11 counties of North Alabama. Together they feed over 80,000 people annually who are at risk of hunger. The Food Bank partners with companies and churches to provide weekend meal kits to students who depend upon school meals and may go without when school is closed. The kits ensure children arrive to school on Monday morning ready to learn without the distraction of hunger. The food bank distributes food donations to relief organizations throughout the 11 counties that they serve.  For more information about the Food Bank of North Alabama, you can call 256-382-0296. All help and support and donations will be very much appreciated.

Our christian love and heartfelt prayers go out this week for all those in the Danville, Neel and Punkin Center areas who had their homes, churches and fire dept.’s damaged from the Tuesday night, November 29th storms. I want to thank Dale Boyd of Neel for the pictures that he sent me of Shady Grove Baptist Church showing the damages to the church. Shady Grove Baptist Church pastor Tom Campbell shares his thoughts with our Hartselle Enquirer Readers this week from his church news letter. It reads as follows: “Churning-Matthew 13:33” It was an average run of the mill, so so summer day at Ma Ma’s house. I worked my way across the yard high stepping to avoid sand spurs and things the chickens left behind. Finally making it to the porch I stopped at the water bucket and grabbed a sip from the dipper. Their water(drawn from a sand rock well) seemed to taste better than the chlorinated stuff that came from our faucet at home. In the kitchen, next to the slop bucket(a five gallon can filled with table scraps fed to the pigs) sat my Ma Ma in front of an old brown churn of milk, patiently stroking the shaft of a wooden handle up and down. The sloshing of the dasher made a soothing rhythmic sound as she went about the task. Occasionally she would allow me to open the top and peer inside to look for signs of the object of  her labor. After what seemed to be an eternity small flakes, yellow dots began to appear in the white mixture. As the process continued the flakes joined other dots of yellow and both my and Ma Ma’s anticipation grew. Finally, the dasher(a small wooden cross attached to the end of the wooden handle used to agitate the milk) would be covered with a significant glob of yellow butter. She would take it off, put it into a butter mold and place it in the fridge. When sufficiently chilled it would be removed wrapped in wax paper and stored away until needed to garnish hot biscuits covered with syrup my granddad had made.  Ministry is a lot like churning it takes patience and time. God has His own dasher. It too is a wooden cross. Its agitating power was the conflict of the perfect Son of God in the context  of human depravity. When He is consistently mixed into the context of the world He will change lives creating visable results, usable to the purpose of the God of the universe. Keep churning!! “Bearing fruit on your behalf” Brother Tom Campbell.