UMs show gratitude with their hands

 

Relief chief explains
how church members
care for all God’s people

By Claudia M. Williams
Staff Writer
United Methodists give thanks with their hands.
That was the message the Rev. Paul Dirdak, head of the United Methodist Committee on Relief, brought to the Bishop’s Thanksgiving Gathering Nov. 20 in Corpus Christi.
Dirdak, guest preacher for the event, told more than 400 worshipers at First UMC, Corpus Christi, that United Methodists show gratitude with their hands in three ways.
The first way, said Dirdak, deputy general secretary of the New York-based United Methodist mission board, was by getting their hands dirty.
“We’re not afraid to go where there are problems and be there hard at work,” he said. “When you send and ship blankets and the rest to Sager Brown (relief committee depot in Baldwin, La.), that’s what happens.
“We had a couple of hundred 48-foot container loads of flood buckets out of Sager Brown into this (Hurricanes Rita and Katrina) disaster zone. That’s thousands upon thousands upon thousands of flood buckets—that’s using our hands.”
The second way, Dirdak said, was by going “all the way to where the people are.”
“We’re the only church that goes into the land of Mozambique and removes landmines from the soil,” Dirdak said.
Other churches teach about landmines, he said, but stop there.
“Your church finds them and removes them so people can go back to work on the farms,” he said.

The third way United Methodists show gratitude, Dirdak said, was by understanding arithmetic.
“We have a bad way of answering big problems with symbolic gestures,” Dirdak said. “It makes no sense at all to bring small solutions to big problems.”
United Methodists work on a large scale, he said, because “God has 6 billion people, never mind that only a few are United Methodist.”
“The people with whom this church is concerned number 6 billion,” Dirdak said.
Betty Slagle, a member of First UMC, Corpus Christi, said the gathering and Dirdak’s remarks brought the importance of Thanksgiving more to people’s attention.
Joyce Lanphier, also a First UMC member, said Dirdak’s presentation made her feel that she personally was part of what The United Methodist Church had been doing.
Bishop Joel N. Martinez has called Thanksgiving gatherings annually since 2001 as special times for people of the Southwest Texas and Rio Grande conferences to celebrate their many blessings from God. Church members from both conferences attended the service.