Nicole is an event team leader for Feed My Starving Children. She was part of the record-breaking event last weekend in Virginia. Here she shares some of her reflections:

I am finally home after spending a week in Virginia as part of FMSC’s largest food packing event.

A lot of records were set (…then quickly broken…), and while those numbers are exciting,it’s the individual stories that are connected to those numbers that give them their meaning.

At the moment it was announced that we had just set the record for the most meals ever packed at an FMSC packing event, I was talking to one of my rice scoopers who told me she had to leave but wanted to share something with me first.

She was exhausted, sweaty and sore (helping to scoop 10,000 pounds of rice will do that to you), but she had a smile of pure joy across her face.

She was telling me how she had eaten these meals in her home country of El Salvador and that they helped give her and her family the strength to move to the United States and make a new life for themselves.

She said that she had recently gone back and helped feed families just like her’s who used to not know where their next meal was going to come from.

She said each smile she saw as she handed over the plates of food was hope being restored and she was so excited to be with us in Virginia to help scoop rice and watch the meals be packed because until then she did not know where the food came from.

It was a full circle moment for her and a moment of realization for myself.

This is why I do what I do.

Not for the high numbers, not for the excitement and self satisfaction in a job well done. It’s to experience these moments.

To strip down a 5 million meal event to one person, one story that has been transformed through the goodness and beauty of a loving God.

It all starts with one meal and I am so blessed to be able to see and hear what that one meal can become.

Read more highlights from the 2016 Food Fight event HERE.