Here’s a little something that got sucked into my black hole of non-blogging during the last [gulp] half of 2015:

That is a picture of the results of the Offering of Letters we collected in October. Apparently, it wasn’t as memorable as I would have liked. When I asked our church’s Administrative Council what the subject of the letters was, no one had an answer.

Here’s a look:

I urge you to make sure children at risk of hunger receive the healthy meals they need to thrive. One in five children in our nation live at risk of hunger. For every six low-income children who receive a school lunch, only about half also get a school breakfast, and only one also gets a meal during the summer months. In other words, many children are probably missing some meals daily.

Specifically, I urge you to pass a child nutrition bill that protects child nutrition programs and connects more children with healthy meals while not cutting other safety-net programs.

When we write such letters, it is easy to wonder about their efficacy. Do our 80-some letters do any good? Well, when combined with the 220,000 other letters written around the country as part of Bread for the World’s 2015 Offering of Letters, the answer is a resounding, “Yes!”.

Late January came good news about a child nutrition bill: The Senate Agriculture Committee passed the Improving Child Nutrition Integrity and Access Act of 2016. This bill would reauthorize expired child nutrition programs. Additionally, the bill would “streamline summer and after-school meal programs to make it easier to serve meals to kids year-round. The bill allows some states to provide summer EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards to families in hard-to-reach areas to purchase groceries. It also allows some states to use alternative methods of reaching kids when they are unable to make it to meal sites.”

See that last request in our letters: “while not cutting other safety-net programs.”? Well, the Improving Child Nutrition Integrity and Access Act does not make cuts to SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) or other anti-poverty programs to pay for these changes! Our law-makers listened to us! Hallelujah!

While this Act has yet to pass the full Senate and is not yet law, the bipartisan cooperation is a very good sign. Neither Illinois Senator is on the Agriculture Committee, but when the bill goes before the full Senate, Mark Kirk and Dick Durbin will need to hear from us again.

Stay tuned…and stay alert to the continual movement of God’s Holy Spirit among us — especially in surprising places like the U.S. Senate!