An afternoon of playing basketball and kickball with a bunch of kids really wiped my energy. I haven’t played hoops in ages and it showed. Even my kickball skills have slowed. Regardless, it was awesome day.
As mentioned earlier, we started at St Herman’s cleaning out these apartments owned by the community. The eccentric who ran the place was a major horder and it was quite a mess. We filled an entire dumpster.
We also worked alongside court ordered community service guys, people who broke the law and have been given community service hours as their punishment. I noticed the guys reminded me of old school friends, some of whom also went the way of a life of crime.
Oliver, who I mentioned yesterday was facing a similar situation financially as my own sister. And the kids in the after-school program played the same
Games and acted like I did when I was growing up. Would I one day be afraid of these same children when they grow up?
God calls us to remember that these people who grew up in not such different circumstance than I did are not simply like us in terms of their common humanity, but rather, there’s a bit of us in each on of them. One bad decision makes us like those guys in the morning, the lack of a caring teacher or mentor turns one of our lives into chaos in middle or high school and how far are any of us from being financially in debt?
We have met the children of the working poor, the hungry, the criminal and they are us, even if only a bit of us.
Today let us pray for all those who live in dire situations. Those who feel there is no way out of poverty’s cycle. Let us cry for the children caught in the mess of their parent’s decisions. And let us pray for ourselves that we may always recognize ourselves and our God in those that we often think of as “the other.”
Today: off to a hospice or a book collection for prisoners and later a drop in center and we’ll do some work for Central America as well.