Blessings in a basket: A morning at the Micah 6 food pantry

'A volunteer! A volunteer! Get someone from the bagging table."

A woman rushes out from the pantry. They are short on helpers inside the pantry to assist clients with their red plastic baskets. I'm standing in the bagging line, linebacker style, ready to pack the next shopper's groceries and say, "You have a blessed day." For me, it's a brief idle moment in a tornado-style Saturday morning.

I'm at Micah 6, a food pantry at University Presbyterian Church on San Antonio Street. The pantry, operated by a consortium of University of Texas-area churches, is open for exactly one hour on Thursdays and one hour on Saturdays. Named after a Bible verse promoting charity toward others, the pantry creates a market atmosphere for its clients, who must meet eligibility standards set by the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas to shop here.

Fresh fruit, pasta, baby food, frozen ground beef and blueberries, cans of meatballs . The food comes from grocery stores, private donors and the food bank. An hour before the shoppers arrive, the shelves are fully stocked. A minute after they leave, the shelves are all but barren.

Many of the clients at Micah 6 are regulars. They put their reusable bags on a shelf outside the pantry to reclaim as they exit and know whom to ask for help with heavy loads.

I've been dispatched from the bagging line to the pantry. Inside, I assist a woman with red spiky hair, a yellow "Texas" T-shirt and a back problem. Her basket is already the weight of a fit kindergartener and she's not even halfway through the pantry.

Would you like some spaghetti sauce? Some noodles? What about whole-wheat pasta, one bag or two? Yes, yes, and, of course, two.

The shoppers file in, some with helpers, some with their spouses. They choose from plastic cartons filled with amber shallots, bright orange carrots and tiny oranges. Volunteers scoop out the allotted amount into each shopper's bin. Most shoppers came away with a few blue boxes of Rice Krispies cereal, several cartons of concentrated orange juice and a box of Ritz crackers. As long as shoppers can fit an item into their arms or their one red basket, they can take it with them. With the neon lighting and well-stocked shelves, the Micah 6 Food Pantry is a full-sized grocery store shrunken to fit into two rooms.

As the client and I round the corner in the pantry, we negotiate which loaves of bread she should bring home. She decides on a fluffy French loaf and a nutty pre-sliced loaf. Her eyes are already on the jam-filled cookies ahead. We inch forward in the line. She nods yes and yes as the volunteers offer other food, but only the cookies matter.

The cans and boxes weigh down the basket. I watch as other volunteers slide overflowing baskets along the floor with their feet. I copy them. A bag of noodles tumbles out. I pick the basket back up. The cookies! A volunteer hands the shopper a plastic box full.

"Can I have another?"

"But you're only allotted one," the volunteer says as she slides another box into our basket. The shopper smiles.

We triumphantly move toward the frozen-food section. The limited meat supply for this Saturday is already gone. We load up on orange juice instead. As we leave the pantry, I waddle under the weight of the basket.

Churches unite

"He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."

— Micah 6:8

A little more than six years ago, nine churches near the University of Texas came together to support one another's outreach projects. University Baptist Church had a jump-start project, Manna, to help feed the hungry. The churches focused on that project. The new group was guided by a concept developed a few years earlier by the National Council of Churches of Christ to bring churches together to serve, following the guidance of the Bible verse Micah 6:8.

In the summer of 2004, Micah 6 was incorporated as a nonprofit organization. As time passed, the group grew to include regular volunteers from non-affiliated churches as well as people from the community. In its first year of operation, the organization's Web site reports, Micah 6 served 9,600 households and 17,329 individuals.