From behind the counter of his bright red food truck, Kevin could see healthcare workers waving, holding up signs of gratitude from the windows of a Brockton hospital. He was there to deliver free meals for the frontline workers there, an endeavor inspired in large part by his wife. “My wife is a nurse. I’m a layperson, comparatively. I listen to the things they’re called to—the heat of battle. It’s difficult and people are dying and there’s a lot of pain at this time,” he says referring to the outbreak of COVID-19.
It was early one morning when Kevin got the idea to use his food truck, Boston’s Baddest Burgers, to do something for those healthcare workers. He recalls the text message he sent to his life group: “I said I propose that Boston’s Baddest Burger give out 100 sliders and 100 fries for the folks on the night shift.” He picked the night shift intentionally. “They really don’t get any of these kind of things. Everything happens during the day,” he says. His life group jumped on the idea, and they agreed to focus their effort locally, on Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital. “Lot of folks had been focusing on the hospitals in Boston,” he says. “I was familiar with the location, and our life group meets in Brockton. It all just worked.”
When the day arrived to serve up food at the hospital, Kevin was excited. “It was really doing two things at once I was seeking to do: one was to bless people, and the other was to see more of my friends.” For Kevin, doing this project with his life group was something he had been looking forward to. Since the food truck industry had been classified as essential when a statewide stay-at-home order was issued for non-essential organizations, Kevin’s hours made it tough for him to participate in online life group meetings. “I have just been working non-stop,” he says. “I was disconnected from my life group, and I really missed them.”
That day, Kevin and his staff finished their last work event and headed off to pick up supplies they would need to serve the meals at the hospital that night, but when they stopped at their facility in Norwood, the unexpected happened. “When we pulled up, two-thirds of the exhaust system of the food truck deposited itself in the middle of the road. I’m gonna cry,” says Kevin. “We had this dilemma. We had this event that’s very, very important for a gazillion reasons. We’ve got to get this food truck that cannot go anywhere now, and we’re supposed to be serving in two hours! I tell people I feel like it was Satan saying, ‘You are not going to this. It’s not gonna happen.’”
The clock was ticking, and Kevin had to think quick. “I ran across the street. The co-owner of the place where I get all my meats, he’s just ready to get in his vehicle to leave, and I run up to him in a panic, and I pointed to my food truck. He goes, ‘Ugh. Let’s get it over here.’” The co-owner set to work on the truck using whatever supplies he could find on hand. “He band-aids it all up,” says Kevin with a laugh. After some time, Kevin set off for the hospital with his makeshift repairs, and to his relief, the food truck ran without a hitch. “We were on site on time. That was just God. God’s like, ‘Watch this,’” he says.
The response that Kevin says he and his life group received when they arrived at the hospital was humbling: “The staff was holding signs out front: ‘thank you.’ Up in the windows in the hospital, they were waving and holding signs.” Kevin describes how it felt to serve them: “My intent when I got into this business in the food truck industry was affecting people’s lives and doing it in the name of Christ, so it was huge. It was fun.”
Kevin also buzzes when he talks about how it felt to see his life group again, even if for just a short time: “A whole bunch of wonderful people that love Christ got together and rocked people’s world, and it was a blast. What a great way to force a meeting with my life group folks and bless people that are on the front lines. It was a blessing to us as much as a blessing to them, if not more to us. It’s a blast to bless people.”
Having gotten the opportunity to serve people with his food truck and life group friends, Kevin encourages other people to explore how they can be a blessing to others as well. “Oftentimes, people underestimate how they can bless people,” he says. “You have a specific talent or skill and God prods you to bless someone with it, my advice would be do it. Do it! Because the blessings are significant in both directions. That’s the way God works. He blesses who we bless, and He blesses us.”
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