Monday, March 25, 2024
Friends,
It is the Monday evening before Easter. The Palm Sunday service yesterday was remarkable. For me it called my attention, once again, to the love and the hope Jesus gave to the people. When Jesus taught, he called people to follow Him, caused them to reach out to Him, and He taught by example and by living how He wanted us to live.
It is always significant to me, that the Kansas Mennonite Relief Sale is always in close proximity to Easter. It must have been by design. To ask people to come to the relief sale and to ask them to give of themselves, “in the name of Christ”.
As we approach April 12 and 13 let us feel called to give of ourselves for the purpose of helping others.
How may we give of ourselves? In so many ways…but in every way it involves sharing from the heart, sharing of our skills, sharing of our time, our abilities, our money, and ourselves.
We appreciate and need volunteers. We need volunteers to help make food to eat, to help sell the food, that will benefit those communities needing immediate relief. We need volunteers to commit to making a beautiful quilt that will help to feed people. We need volunteers that will use their talents and abilities to donate things to the sale so that medical assistance will be provided. We need volunteers of all ages to donate coins so that people in Africa and other places around the world will have safe water, close to where they live.
Volunteers are people who see beauty in a piece of wood, have grease on their hands from restoring a tractor, bring to the sale poppy seed rolls and homemade pie, and who take time off from their job to serve the Lord and help to create a legacy of serving so that other people can live…so that other people know the God has not forgotten them. When we volunteer to help at the Kansas Mennonite Relief Sale, or any of the other relief sales, we are engaged in God’s work…providing hope and allowing love to be felt and passed on.
Please come to the sale…volunteer and invest in this great purpose to help those by treating them as Jesus would have treated them…with love, compassion, care, humbleness, and selflessness.
Please come and volunteer at the many booths where we need volunteers. Check our website and find the volunteer’s page… then help to make New Year’s Cookies, or bake sausage and fry verenike, or sell pies or t-shirts…ice cream or quilts. There are many opportunities.
Or come and buy a guitar, a used car, a quilt that is beautiful, a bowl of borscht, a hamburger, or an antique. To volunteer is to invest yourself in the cause of helping people so they will be able to help themselves and then help others.
Each day I invest in the work of the Kansas Mennonite Relief Sale and the Mennonite Central Committee bring joy to my heart, for I know that I am getting more from this experience than I will ever fully know.
God requires us to love justice, be merciful, and walk humbly with God. Come let us walk together with Jesus so we can provide hope and love to many around the world.
I hope to see you in Hutchinson on April 12 and 13, helping us to “sow seeds of hope…seeds of love”
Jim Robb, Chairman, KMRS Board