The Power of Hope
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Miss Kansas, Carissa Kelly, and school kids in Haiti
“Five minutes of hope is all some people need to keep from committing suicide. Don’t try to give them hope for the future a year from now, give them hope for a future five minutes from now.”
When the speaker at the conference made that comment, I had no idea that within a week I would learn whether or not that statement was true. I was summoned in the middle of the night to the house of a suicidal man. As I entered his house and saw the .357 lying on his lap, I began to speak to him about the future in terms of minutes, not hours, not days, not weeks. That has been 15 years ago and he is living a very full life now. Hope is powerful.
One of the most powerful things Numana food does, in addition to the incredible nutritional impact it makes on a starving person, is that it comes accompanied by hope. When our food is distributed, it is communicated to the people receiving it that volunteers who love them have packaged it. Numana is not a big company making millions of dollars off the sale of food items, but is made up of thousands of volunteers who care deeply that people are hungry and have not only bought the food, but helped package it as well.
People cannot live without food or water. And people cannot live without hope. The power of Numana food is that it fills both the hunger in the tummy for food and the hunger in the heart to be loved. It lets starving people know that, a world away from them, fellow human beings have heard about their plight and have cared enough to contribute their money and time to help fill their aching tummies.
And they are given strength to live another day.