In late 2015 I was in a state of personal dishevelment (I wrote about it here). All 4 of my kids were finally in school full time and I was struggling with many things in my life…my weight, my job, the amount of “stuff” I owned, the empty house and my overall feeling of dissatisfaction with everything. For a normally overall happy person, I was really, really unhappy and I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it.

That same year, my son was going through confirmation at church, which required him to seek out and participate in a variety of community service activities. I found a local food kitchen that needed a few volunteers on a Saturday afternoon to “prep food”. Jacob and my husband went and spent the day peeling carrots, chopping vegetables, washing dishes and more. My teenager came home a changed person. He was bubbling over with excitement about the day he spent with “Kenny” (the man in charge of the kitchen prep team) and the work the Kansas City Community Kitchen was doing. I thought to myself, “If volunteering has my teenager this excited then I really need to check it out!”

Thus began my real love for volunteering. I grew up volunteering and actually had been volunteering weekly teaching school of religion to middle schoolers and working with kids at our local elementary school, but there was something about serving the homeless and underprivileged in our city that really changed my life. Growing up in a fairly sheltered small town and living a life full of love and happiness and let’s face it, privilege, I was shook to my core to see how inwardly selfish I had been to be dissatisfied with my life. I began volunteering once a week then upped that to twice a week and sometimes even three times a week because I knew that the work I was doing was of value and importance. I found purpose where I was least expecting it…inside a food kitchen in Kansas City Missouri. …

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