Alice "Mother" Lawrence's big smooth palm closed around my wrist. She pulled me through a room piled with donated food into the church that used to be her living room. Old pews stood in lines. Instruments crowded the picture window.

Her husband, Jacob, was waiting for us in the car. I was supposed to go with them on an errand to pick up some donations. But she stretched her hands across the plastic keyboard anyway. A fit of jubilation was coming on.

Lawrence is 74 years old. She and Jacob, who is now 80, have run a renegade back-yard social program in Mountain View, feeding, clothing, counseling, preaching, performing weddings, and singing Sunday morning hymns to keyboard drumbeats for the last 40 years. But recently, important things have started to fray. For the second time in three years, their apartment complex on Richmond Avenue is in foreclosure.

But Lawrence didn't want to talk about that just yet. Instead, she leaned into the keyboard. Familiar notes flowed out, fuzzy with reverb. "Amazing Grace." Everybody loves that song, she said, even the refugees from Asia who have been showing up lately. Did I know it?

"Then sing, honey, sing," she said.

So I sang. And she came in with a harmony. And when we made it through the verse, she started over again, until we were sung out.

"Praise Jesus!" she said, finally. "Now, Sugar, we better get in the car."

FEEDING CHILDREN

Every day Lawrence and her husband load up with cardboard boxes and drive to grocery stores to pick up donated food. They feed children after school and give food boxes and clothes to people who arrive at their door every day around 4:15 p.m.

The mortgage wasn't the first problem on her mind, she said as we drove over to Carrs Aurora Village.

"We need a truck," she said. A big one, tall enough to back up to the truck bay at grocery stores, so Jacob doesn't have to lift the heavy boxes so far.

Jacob totaled their van the week before, she said, and now she wasn't going to let him drive anymore. Their insurance paid for a rental but that was coming to an end. They had a borrowed van lined up, but they needed a permanent one.

The reasons for the foreclosure were mostly the same as last time, she said. Her renters kept slipping away in the night, she said. Then someone stole her credit card and spent money all over town. The pipes burst, the sheetrock turned mushy and had to be repaired, eating through their fixed income and savings. She recently hired a property manager to take care of the details. The bank said she and Jacob need $19,000 to keep from being thrown out.

Lawrence isn't the type to hold fundraisers or apply for grants to support her work. She gets what she needs the old-fashioned way: She puts out the word within the vast network of the neighborhood and then she prays. So far, God has provided. Cases of milk show up in the driveway. Boxes of food arrive on the doorstep.

A few weeks ago, she told someone who came to drop off some clothes about the foreclosure. That person told someone else who wrote me. I showed up at her door with my notebook. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

In 2006, last time they almost lost the house, a radio station raised thousands that bailed them out, she said. Maybe it would again. Maybe the people who came for food would bring a little money, too, she said. They are scared she'll shut her doors.

"I have faith God gonna work it out," she said. The light turned yellow. She pushed the gas and sped right through.

'HOW BLESSED WE ARE'

Inside the back door at Carrs, the Lawrences unloaded grocery carts full of day-old baguettes, dented cans of pumpkin, nearly out-of-date cottage cheese and lackluster cucumbers. Lawrence peered through a plastic dome that held a day-old coconut cake decorated with plastic Santa Clauses.

"Look how blessed we are!" she said.

Jacob stooped over a box. He was wearing a hearing aid made to look like a Bluetooth headset they bought from a television commercial, but he still couldn't hear too much. He pulled boxes across the floor, seeming tired.

When all the boxes were full, Jacob pushed them into the van, filling it from floor to ceiling. I perched on a sliver of back seat, a box of bread in my lap. By the time we got through Midtown, Lawrence was deep in old stories. One time she gave away their bed while Jacob was out of town. Ooh, he was gonna be mad. But someone donated another one just in time.

Lawrence has a habit of giving away her own things even when she needs them. That's how come she has no mittens, she said, and why she went through all her shoes. The ones she had on were too small. She wears a size 12, wide.

"With each of my children my breasts got smaller, and my feet got bigger," she told me. "I said, 'God, you have a sense of humor.' "

Lawrence's freelance style makes her a controversial figure in the local food pantry scene. She has nonprofit status, but she isn't affiliated with the Food Bank of Alaska. They say it's because she won't follow basic food safety standards. She says her standards are just fine and she doesn't agree with their rules. She takes a food safety class every year, she said. She has one of the only pantries in the city open every day, and likely the only one that gives people food, no questions asked.

"I was here before them, anyway," she said "I don't need to join them, this is God's program."

We stopped to get gas and Jacob got out. Mother Lawrence's hair hung in uneven gray braids. She pulled one out and ran her hand through it. She hasn't been to the hairdresser in two years, she told me. Sometimes, when she's tired, she said, she tries to remember the feeling of someone else shampooing her.

Right about then Jacob got in. He rummaged through a box and handed a loaf of garlic bread and some sweet rolls out the window to a man in the parking lot.

"See why we can't stop?" she said.

DISTRIBUTING FOOD: Alice "Mother" Lawrence, who runs a food pantry out of her Mountain View home, is facing foreclosure again. Sam Y Ramey, right, helps distribute food to the needy. (BOB HALLINEN / Anchorage Daily News)

AN ENDLESS PARADE

At 4:15 p.m on Monday, 30 people stood in the driveway on Richmond Avenue, shivering in house shoes and sweatshirts, carrying blanket-wrapped children, hobbling on limbs chewed up by diabetes, pushing walkers and rolling shopping bags over the snow.

Inside, Lawrence and a couple volunteers parceled out cakes and handfuls of mushrooms and Yoplait yogurts and garlic bread. Cardboard boxes filled with chaotic stacks covered every surface. Someone knocked on the door. Lawrence sighed and cracked it open.

"I know your feet cold. You know this is Alaska, right?" she hollered. "We're doing the hard work in here. You're the one that need to bundle up. Instead of complaining, thank God, OK? You know I love you."

I watched people trail in. There was a 20-something girl with a pierced lip, a harried single mother and her daughter, a 10-year-old girl, the oldest of eight, with her mother who spoke only Hmong, a middle-aged man who kept saying "I have nothing" in Spanish, and a delicate, wrinkled German woman whom Lawrence hugged for a long time. She sized up each person who came in, tucking in extra chocolate milk, or bread or cake, depending.

A grandmother from Laos came through the door, wearing only a sweater. Lawrence asked her where her coat was. She spoke no English. She looked at Lawrence blankly.

"You stay right there," Lawrence said, and disappeared upstairs. A few minutes later, she came back with a fur coat from her bedroom closet and wrapped it around the woman's shoulders. The woman smiled, showing a few missing teeth. She turned to a nephew and fluffed her hair like a movie star.

"You ain't givin' the best you got, you ain't giving nothing," Lawrence told me as the woman left, her box heavy with extra custard pie. "God will always take care of you."

THANK YOU: Alice "Mother" Lawrence gives a hug to Amanda True of Cub Scout Pack 101 after True dropped off 20 bags of donations gathered by pack members. (BOB HALLINEN / Anchorage Daily News)

Update, Tuesday 12/29: Mother Lawrence's phone works now, but she's still in the hole, click here.