Last Call Outreach Ministry

As I did my grocery shopping this afternoon at my local Food City, I started thinking about how blessed I am to live in a country where food is so plentiful. I asked ChatGPT how many items a supermarket generally carries, and it said between 30,000 and 60,000 different items. That is an incredible number of choices.

I’m also aware of how blessed I am to have enough money to walk into a huge store like this and buy the food I need. I know there are many people who are not so blessed.

I live in the United States, and by American standards, I am poor. I live well below the poverty line. But by the world’s standards, I know I live better than a lot of people. There are people around the world who don’t even have enough money to buy the food they need. And in some places, even having the money doesn’t guarantee that there will be enough food available to buy.

I was just watching a video on YouTube about a poor area in Manila. The very poor sometimes eat something called Pagpag. Pagpag is food that has been thrown away or discarded by restaurants, grocery stores, or other sources. Some of it is collected from garbage dumps, then sorted, washed, and cooked. It is sold in the very poor slums, not because people want to eat it, but because it is often all they can afford.

Some families actually make their living collecting food from garbage bins and dump sites. They take what they find, sort it, wash it, boil or fry it, and then sell it to people living in the slums.

The cost of Pagpag is low, often around 25 pesos, which is about 40 cents in American money. That may not sound like much to us, but think about what they are buying. They are buying food that someone else threw away and that may have been sitting in a city garbage dump.

That really made me stop and think.

Yes, I suddenly feel very blessed.

I may be poor by American standards, but when I look at the world around me, I realize just how much I have. I can walk into a grocery store filled with tens of thousands of different food items and choose what I want to eat. I have clean water. I have a place to live. I have food available to me.

There are millions of people who would consider those things a luxury.

My heart goes out to the people around the world who have to live in such conditions. I don’t know what it is like to be hungry enough to eat food pulled from a garbage dump, and I hope I never have to find out.

So tonight, I’m going to remember that I may not have much by American standards, but I have much more than many people in this world.

I am grateful.

And I pray for those who have less.

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