MANSFIELD - The summer brings added stress to food pantries across North Texas. School is out and the number of children needing to eat goes up.
In fact, traffic is up 54 percent at food pantries across North Texas right now.
But one ministry that supplies pantries, churches and hundreds of families has suddenly been hit with a plague of bad luck.
Almost all the freezers at Harvesting International Ministry Center in Mansfield have stopped cooling.
That means no frozen food for clients, like Linda Putman, who rely on the ministry to help feed 20-or-so foster children in her transitional housing program.
"It's such a blessing to us, in order for us to be a blessing," she said.
Putman is feeling the love, as she loads up mac and cheese, hot dogs, cookies and bread.
But the man providing the food is feeling the heat, in all the wrong places.
"Supposed to be a cooler, but if you notice, it's not working at all. It quit. The compressor quit," said Gregory Dewbrew.
He moves from one walk-in cooler to another, shaking his head. "This side is a freezer, and now it's acting like a refrigerator," he says. "It's not freezing."
Neither is the other one, a few feet away. "Supposed to be a freezer. But it's acting as a cooler, not a freezer."
Dewbrew has run Harvesting International Ministry Center out of a Mansfield warehouse since 1999, dispensing canned goods and frozen foods.
But just in the last few days, he says almost all his freezers and coolers have suddenly gone out, including a huge freezer truck outside that was his main storage unit.
"It's really not working at all now. They all went boom. I thought, it's crazy," he said.
Now at this point, some folks might think God is talking to them. That would include Dewbrew. The acronym for Harvesting International Ministries is HIM. "That him, it's all about Him, Jesus," says Dewbrew. "That's what we do, so it's all about Him."
Dewbrew says he knows how to do the Lord's work, but refrigeration, that's another matter. So he's put out an urgent plea for guardian angels, ones that come with spare parts and freon.
Harvesting International Ministries can be found at 560 Easy Drive, Mansfield TX 76063. Telephone: (817) 453-3663 | Fax (817) 473-0929 E-mail: info@himcenter.org
