Winter Weather Hits the Homeless Hard!!!

Dear SoupFriends,

Its Thursday Jan 7th at 5:00PM and the temperatures are plummeting, Tonight it's expected to go down below 15 degrees. With the wind blowing the wind chill will be close to zero. To make matters worse the nighttime temperatures are not expected to rise above the freezing point for the next week or so. In the Dallas area there are over 10,000 homeless people, but only 2,000 shelter beds. Simple math tells us there is not enough 'room at the inn.'

This kind of cold is flat out dangerous for our homeless men and women. This is the kind of cold that causes serious illness and sometimes death because of hypothermia . If you are lucky enough to have your own home or apartment you will have to keep the heat systems at full bore just to stay warm. But imagine if you were sleeping outside in a cardboard box under a bridge. No thermostat to turn up and no fireplace to sit around and drink hot chocolate and warm your toes.

During the cold snap the SoupMobile will be on emergency patrol in the Dallas area. We will be out in our van late into the night passing out warm blankets, coats, boots and food. The SoupMan needs your help. We desperately need blankets and coats to help us get through this cold snap and then the rest of the winter.

The City of Dallas has called a Code Blue Alert because of the cold weather. The SoupMobile is calling its own Code Red Alert. Bring your warm weather items to the SoupMobile 3017 Commerce St. Dallas, Texas 75226. Coats, blankets, boots, hats, gloves---whatever you can spare to help keep these precious children of the Lord most high warm. The SoupMobile will make sure your donations get distributed to the ones that need it most---the ones Jesus called the 'least of these.'

If you can't donate any warm weather items, please give prayerful consideration to making a financial donation to the SoupMobile so we can go out and buy more coats, blankets, hats and gloves. To make a donation simply go to http://www.soupmobile.org/ and click on DONATE.

I know that for the next few nights as we pass our coats, blankets and food its going to be miserably cold. However I have the comfort of knowing that when we are finished with our runs I will eventually be crawling into a warm bed with the heater blasting. For thousands of homeless people in the Dallas area, there will be no warm bed or heater to turn up. Only the cold North wind blowing and numbing their hands and feet and cutting them to the bone.

Help me help them. The time to act is now. Don't let another winter day go by without doing something to help.

May the Lord bless and keep you.

Signed, David Timothy, a.k.a. The SoupMan

Executive Director---SoupMobile Inc.