Do you want to know what it means...?

Do you want to know what it means…?

It means…repairing a family car or looking for a car for a family. It means… collecting medical supplies. It means…filling paint buckets with supplies for kids labeled for a particular age child. It means…giving blood. It means…providing meals for shelters. It means…working with churches of all faiths to help people who are in desperate need. It means…organizing volunteer crews who are awaiting clearance to go into the flooded areas to restore communications lines. It means…sorting and boxing truckloads of clothes and personal hygiene items that are arriving from all over the country. It means…weeping. It means…adopting a couple with a family – a child and grandparents - furnishing their house and getting them set up. It means…therapists and psychiatrists volunteering time as counselors at the convention center with people who are destitute, or drug addicts or have medical problems. It means…supporting children who have entered your school system. It means…getting in a truck and helping to get a church whose roof has blown off under cover. It means…learning to use a chain saw. It means…getting a family from Texas to Atlanta, Georgia. It means…partnering your congregation with a Quality Inn owner who opened his hotel to over 300 refugees, and has fed and housed them and now is placing them in apartments. It means…creating “move-in” boxes with all the essentials. It means…volunteering in neighborhoods and schools. It means…leading the mental health response in your community. It means…collecting animal companion food and supplies for the Humane Society. It means…sitting with evacuees at the doctor’s office. It means…collecting quarters for laundry machines for people to wash their clothes in. It means…holding a woman who is no longer coherent as she is dying. It means…helping children process what has happened, what they are seeing on television. It means…making an apartment you own available to a family in need. It means…putting on a benefit concert for a prison/criminal justice ministry program. It means…having a potluck for UUs in the Diaspora at your church. It means…helping children make dog biscuits to sell at coffee hour so the profits can go to a rescue center that saves stranded animals. It means…buying school clothes for children who need them. It means…having a Board meeting by conference call because your board is scattered all over the country. It means…taking donated wheelchairs to people who need them. It means…shipping a thousand condoms for HIV people and drug users where and when they are needed. It means…carving a beautiful wooden bowl out of a 90 year old piece of Pecan from a blown-down tree for a wounded congregation to use for joys and concerns candles. It means…coordinating rides for people without cars so they can go to the doctor, or to a job interview. It means…giving a dollar or hundreds or thousands of dollars to the Relief Fund. It means…being a guest on a radio program and talking about what happened It means…partnering with a Louisiana congregation from far across the country because you care and want to help. It means…doing crisis intervention during a town meeting when the tension rises. It means…being a minister who came from California to Louisiana to help a hurricane stricken congregation. It means…holding a memorial service for an 87 year-old member of your congregation who died as a result of the Hurricane. It means…telling your congregation that this is our generation’s opportunity; a moment of grace if you will, to change the face of our nation which has flourished too long on a culture of racial and economic division.

Gulf Relief - Buy a t-shirt and help victims of the hurricanes!

"Do you know what it means...?" - An Owner's Manual