Food Service Conference  “Send Me”

    This up coming week I have an opportunity to speak at our yearly “Food Service Conference”.  It’s a conference where Directors and Chefs alike from churches all over the country get together and share ideas, goals and passion for serving Christ.  It’s where larger church Director’s can help and mentor smaller church Directors.  Churches from all denominations.  This year the conference is held at First Orlando Baptist Church in Florida.  This gives everyone who comes an opportunity to have some fun in the surrounding areas, Disney, Sea World and some great restaurants.

    Topics being discussed will be everything from food cost to food safety.  I’ll be speaking on the opportunity to use this ministry as an “Outreach”.   Use the food service ministry to minister to our surrounding community. 
    So often we get caught up in our daily routine of getting the task done that’s in front of us, but we forget about the heart of what we’re doing.  It’s to serve God; that is what originally brought me here to Sarasota Baptist Church.  I wasn’t looking for a job when I started serving dinners at the church.  God called me here.  It’s so much more than then just the food you’re serving.  It’s the passion behind the dinner plate not the actual plate.
    In Isaiah 6:8, God is looking for a servant to send out to serve Him.  He asks, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?”  And Isaiah spoke up and said, “Here I am!  Send me.”  That’s it in a nutshell; looking for the time in everything we do to serve Him.  The dinner table is such a great time for conversation.  So many things happen around the dinner table; a marriage proposal, business decisions, dates, sharing the joy of telling your parents that they’re going to be grandparents.  Why not an invitation for Salvation?
    A good friend of mine Chuck McAlister said in his book.  Living in a Nation Under Judgment, “Being God’s messenger in a nation under judgment will demand a high price because people living a lie resent hearing the truth.  However, serving God in a nation under judgment occurs because He calls you, not because it is easy.”
    How He calls us can be in so many different ways.  Mine is clearly to use food.  Some of those ways have been quite challenging.  Taking me out of my comfort zone, if you will.  I’ve had the opportunity to serve lunch to 400 Cancer Survivors at an awareness walk for the past two years.  Also have been on television showing how to make recipes once a month.  What a great way to communicate who we are as a church through making food.  One of the best things we done were to give about 6000 nurses cookies for “Nurses Week”.  It started out as a business proposal, but ended up as an awesome outreach.  We had the opportunity to give cookies to every nurse’s station at our local hospital and say “Thank you for what you do,” now who doesn’t like to hear that.  I got so many e-mails and phone calls from nurses just taken back from our gratitude for them.  What we did that day was open a door.  Doors of conversation letting them know that we as a church are here for them.  We made a lot of friends that day; people still say something to me when I’m in the hospital for whatever reason.  It wasn’t the cookie; it was the love behind the cookie.  The love for them, and for our Savior Jesus Christ.
Pastor Mike Landry once said in his sermon, “You influence people ever day, weather you like it or not.  How you influence them is your choice.  Are you bringing them closer or further away from God in what you do?”
    So I’ll leave you with that.  Look for opportunities everyday to serve Him, wherever you are.
   

 

Bon Appetite and Semper Fi

Chef Ric