August 9th, 2006 Hunger Awareness Meeting

Our lives are busy. David, Diane, Roger, Mary and I meet. There are ongoing agenda items to be discussed. We are slightly behind where we want to be in food collection. We talk about an item in the monthly newsletter, an insert, magnets with each month's collectible items to keep the church aware of the monthly donations.

The importance of prayer to start and end meetings like this became more evident for me today. Pastor Dayle normally leads us in those prayers but she was on vacation. We moved from a few of us talking about some of the agenda items to beginning the meeting and the opening prayer was missed.

As I reflect back, I lost a context and perspective in my heart and I believe the opening and closing prayer may have been the reason. My mind was on how busy we were, together with the work Mary and I would be doing on the insert, and where that activity would fit in our schedules. I admit it was not until thinking about writing this that God came back into perspective.

Praying publicly does not come easy to me because I don’t make a habit of preparing for it. Before this meeting I dashed out a short agenda and thought of old business and new business. I knew Pastor Dayle was going to be gone but never a thought for prayer.

Other than that this was a good meeting. We talked about giving the youth an opportunity to get involved, perhaps with an Oregon Food Bank Work Day. They are eager to do something after the San Antonio youth gathering.