Souper Bowl 2018!

Living in central Pennsylvania, the weekend of February 3-4 was especially exciting for us. We have always had great collection bins (giant footballs) for the Souper Bowl food drive. But, this year, we added another incentive for giving…we labeled one football “Eagles” and the other one “Patriots.” Then, we asked our congregation members to put their offerings into the bin of the team for whom they were rooting!

souper bowl Well, you can see the results in the accompanying photos!

Because of this friendly competition (Eagles over Patriots 32/21), we collected more food items than we have in years - a grand total of 541!

In addition to finding out who the favored team was in our congregation, we went outside the church seeking donations at our local Sam’s Club. The weather was at a low of 16° when we started at 9:00 a.m., but warmed up to about 33° by the time we left at 2:00. While there, we collected 303 individual food items and $260 in monetary donations. Folks were really friendly and some even left and then returned with more food!

Again, Eagles fans predominated. Though there was one Pennsylvanian who was solidly behind the Patriots (granted, he was wearing a Steelers jacket and hat)! WE are extremely thankful that Sam’s allowed us to set up out there for the day!

We are also thankful to other stores who helped us out, too. We received gift cards from Wegmans Food Store, Giant Markets, and Weis Markets. With those, we were able to purchase 85 more cans of food! We more than tripled the amount of our usual donations:

With all this, St. Mark’s was overjoyed to contribute 537 food items to the Lycoming County Food Bank, 4 #10 cans of vegetables to St. Anthony’s Center, and over $413.16 to Shepherd of the Streets.

In this, as in all things we are thankful for God’s guidance in all we do.

Souper Bowl 2018