For safety reasons, The Church of the Palms will not serve a meal this year for Thanksgiving. However, we do feel that some of the goals of the Annual Joyce Spaulding Memorial Thanksgiving Feast can still be met:
- Opportunity for ministry
- Provide extravagant welcome
- Remember Joyce and Roy Spaulding
- Have fun
As an opportunity for ministry, we are asking those who are able to consider donating what they would have spent on their Thanksgiving dinner food donation to the church. In turn, the church will give that money to church ministries that feed people. This would include feeding the homeless in our part of the I-Help program and to the HART Pantry which, among other things, feeds at-risk teens.
To make it fun, we’ll track the donations on a board that represents King Hall. We’ve calculated that our normal dinner costs about $4 per person. For each $4 we receive, we’ll put a token on the board to represent a diner. Our goal is to fill our imaginary King Hall with imaginary diners. The wonderful part comes later when actual people are fed with these donations.
Though this is not the same as gathering together and enjoying a meal of Thanksgiving, those of us who are able can have the opportunity to give thanks for our blessings by sharing with others. I can’t think of anything that would please the Spauldings more than knowing that hungry people are being fed.
Bless you all as we enter the holiday season.
Wendy Whitlock