By Dave Warner

Over time, many of us volunteers have come to think of the patrons of the food cupboard as friends.

We get to know the people who shop here fairly well, sharing family news and bemoaning the weather.

And these bonds are built quite often without ever getting to learn each other’s last names.

Take, for example, a conversation I had the other day with a 60-something-aged woman, who needed a hand unloading her shopping cart. Her car was parked on a slope on Walnut Street, next to the United Methodist Church, where the food cupboard is open for patrons on Thursdays.

While I wheeled her shopping cart down that hill — no easy task — and loaded her groceries into her car’s trunk, we chatted a bit.

She told me she is a caregiver. She helps her husband, who needed an amputation of one leg at the knee, and takes care of her 80-something mom, too.

She does all this even though she herself had to have surgery on one of her knees.

Even with all that, maybe because of all that, she said, while helping to load groceries into her car, “God is great.”

She was profuse in acknowledging how big a help our pantry is in her life, and that of her mom and husband.

Money is a big issue in her household. She has been retired for two years.

They get along somehow, amazingly, on $156 per month, which puts a punctuation mark on the need for food in her household.

God is great indeed.

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Dave Warner is among the dozens of volunteers who help out at the food cupboard each week. His dispatches are based on his experiences at the pantry.