Family Tragedy Sustains Zeal For Food Drive

This has been Food Drive Week at Sandpoint High School. Every year I take an active interest in encouraging my first-period students do their best to bring in the most items of food and win the homeroom competition.

After all, there’s pizza at stake.

Every year, however, Rick Gehring’s math class gets to eat the pizza. In fact, his kids often collect more food than all of the other home-rooms combined.

This year was no exception. Out of 18,427 pounds of food collected by the entire school, Gehring’s class was tops with 5,757 pounds.

For at least a decade, Rick has followed a secret food-drive strategy.

Like a military tactician, he organizes his troops to collect donations and shop for specials on canned goods, turkeys and hams to hand over to the local food bank.

It’s customary for my friend Rick to feign disappointment during the final days of the drive, leading others to believe that maybe this year they have a chance to outwit the perennial champ. The strategy encourages enthusiasm and more food.

Yet, Gehring remains unbeatable.

As the week ends, a human convoy of proud teenagers transport thousands of food items from Room D-12 to a truck bound for the Bonner Community Food Bank.

No matter how large or small his math class is, it always calculates the winning formula. I really don’t mind losing the annual food drive competition to Rick because everybody wins in the end.

I know that from personal experience. Just over a decade ago my family and I were recipients of similar efforts.

Five days before Christmas in 1984, our house burned to the ground. We lost everything. To make matters worse, my husband Bill had lost his father to cancer just four days before. He was in Louisiana for the funeral when my kids and I first spotted the giant flames rising into the night air while driving home from school.

We arrived at our driveway and found neighbors rushing around in blizzard conditions attempting to salvage anything.

The scene meant a fiery, devastating end to a material dimension of our lives, but the beginning of a spiritual awakening to the goodness of people.

Images of that night and the days afterward blended into my most meaningful Christmas story. I never tire of telling it. Within an hour of the abrupt change in our lives, my parents’ phone began ringing off the hook with offers of homes, clothing and money.

For several days afterward, the North Boyer driveway was a traffic jam as a steady stream of generous friends, neighbors, colleagues and strangers came to the door bearing gifts on our behalf.

Within days, several thousand dollars and hundreds of boxes of food, clothing and bedding relieved much of the immediate shock of losing our home. Through that experience, our family learned first-hand of the breadth and depth of behind-the-scenes community good will among churches, schools, civic organizations and individuals toward anyone in need.

It was overwhelming.

How could we ever repay all of these people? We eventually realized that our payback would be a lifelong commitment to simply pass it on. And so, the food drive at Sandpoint High School provides an annual opportunity for me and others like Rick Gehring to pass on the spirit of giving.

He tells students how he learned as a child to share. I tell them my Christmas story and urge them to gather up goodies so that both they and their unknown recipients can share in what my family learned so humbly a decade ago - the true meaning of Christmas.