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grinned. “It helps me to stop worrying about my own problems if I’m busy helping others with theirs. Feeding the hungry is a nice way to spend my spare time.”
    “I’m amazed,” he said, and meant it. “I don’t have a way to go…”
    “I’ll come by and pick you up in the afternoons before I make my rounds,” she promised, “if you’re willing to help.”
    “I’ve got nothing else to do,” he replied gently. “I don’t have anything of my own, or any other place to go except here,” he added, glancing around. “They haven’t tried to throw me out, so I suppose I can stay.”
    “Don’t be silly,” Bev laughed as she joined them. “Of course you can stay, Mr. Harlowe!”
    “Sam,” he corrected. “Call me Sam. Do you know about Mrs. Crandall’s new project?”
    “Mary,” she corrected. “If you get to be Sam, I get to be just Mary.”
    “And I’m Bev,” the older woman laughed. “Now that we’ve settled that, what’s this project, Mary?”
    “Remember I told you I discovered that restaurants throw away their food at the end of the day,” Mary said.
    “And they don’t save the leftovers….” Bev said with a frown.
    “They can’t. It’s against the law. So all that food goes into the garbage.”
    “While people go hungry,” Bev mused.
    “Not anymore. I’ve talked five restaurants into giving me their leftover food,” Mary said. “I’m carrying some to a lady who’s in hiding from her husband.”
    “Doesn’t she know about the battered women’s shelter?” Bev asked at once.
    “She does, but she can’t go there, because her husband threatened to kill her, and she doesn’t want to endanger anyone else,” Mary said. “She’s trying to get in touch with a cousin who’ll send her bus fare home to Virginia, before her husband catches up with her. She’s got two kids. So I’m taking her food. There’s an elderly lady staying in the motel where we are, and I take some to her. But there’s still so much food left over. I thought you might like some for the shelter,” she added hopefully.
    Bev smiled from ear to ear. “Would I!” she exclaimed. “Have you thought of the men’s mission and the food bank?” she added.
    “Men’s mission?” Mary asked blankly.
    “It’s another shelter, but just for men,” Bev said. “And the food bank provides emergency food for families in crisis—where one or both parents are sick or out of work and there’s no money for food. Or disabled people who can’t get out to shop, and elderly people who have no transportation and no money.”
    Mary started to feel a warmth of spirit that she’d never had before. Her own problems suddenly seemed very small. “I’ve heard of the food bank, but I never knew much about it. And I didn’t know we had a men’s mission.”
    “There’s a women’s mission, too,” Bev told her. “We have a Meals-On-Wheels program with its own volunteers who take hot meals to elderly shut-ins. There’s quite an outreach program, but you wouldn’t know unless you’d been homeless or badly down on your luck.”
    “I’m ashamed to say I never knew much about those programs, and never noticed them until I got into this situation,” Mary confessed. “But now I’m wondering if there wasn’t a purpose behind what happened to me. Otherwise, I’d never have been looking into the restaurant food rescue.”
    “It’s nice, isn’t it, how God finds uses for us and nudges us into them?” Bev teased.
    Mary’s eyes shimmered. “I don’t think I’ve ever thought ofthat before, either,” she said. “But whole new avenues of opportunity are opening up in front of me. You know, I never knew how kind people could be until I lost everything.”
    “That’s another way we fit into the scheme of things, isn’t it?” Bev said. “Until we’re caught up in a particular situation, we never think of how it is with people in need. I was homeless myself,” she said surprisingly, “and I ended up in a