As many of you may know from our DVD and Magazine we are regularly conducting a weekly street feeding project on the streets of Cebu … the aim of the project is to provide much needed food for the hungry and homeless street sleepers. There are literally hundreds of men, women and children that are without any shelter at all.
Each Friday night we set out to feed more than 1200 people … including 500 people that are living at the Cemetery.

Recently, on one of these Friday nights a lady that I pray for each time … lent over and asked if I could buy her husband a bed … he suffers from debilitating rheumatism and is completely immobilized … his joints are inflamed and so swollen … he is in pain most of the time and has to sleep on a piece of cardboard. She was literally pleading for a bed for him … how could we say no? When we delivered the bed the next week, they were soooooo happy … but she was still sleeping on the ground on a piece of old, soiled matting. It is just so gut wrenching when you see a fellow human being living in such desperate circumstances. I am not sure about you, but I think when I am in my sixties and seventies I don’t want to be sleeping on the side of the street with little more than a piece of cardboard to call my home …

We gave her a bed too and she was so excited … then her neighbor asked us for one too …

every Friday night she would come and ask …”did you bring me my bed tonight” … I tell you the night that we did bring the bed to her she was soooooo excited … she literally ran with it to her small pile of belongings … picked up her old piece of wood and tossed it aside … grabbing the bed and laying it out … she sat on it … lay on it … and had a beaming smile from ear to ear …it created quite a commotion and the others were asking … why did they give you that? What do they want from you? Nothing she said … nothing, tonight God loved me … He gave me a bed … all our team were very touched and we all wanted to rush out and buy more beds …What a blessing this small gift of love and compassion was … little more than $14.00 for a bed.

We had a visitor that was with us when we gave out one of the beds and they were asking “ wont they just go and sell the bed?” That has not been our experience … the people feel so blessed and this gift also gives them with a sense of dignity … not something you can easily sell.
We have a vision to purchase 150 beds for the street sleepers by Christmas … what a blessing this would be … tonight maybe we can remember these precious ones that lay on the streets of Cebu … when we crawl into our warm and cosy beds … such a small amount … such a huge gift of compassion …