Last night I stopped by St. Paul’s United Methodist Church downtown where The Village was serving the evening meal for Family Promise. This is a ministry where homeless families sleep in classrooms in churches at night, and then go to a Day Center during the day, where a case manager works with them to help them get back on their feet, working to help them find employment, job training, housing, life skills, or whatever they need to get back on track. Each week they stay at a different church in a network of about 8 host churches. Then there are another 8 to 12 support churches like ours that help the host churches by providing extra volunteers. It’s quite an elaborate system, but efficient, because it uses existing buildings that would otherwise be empty during the week to give a temporary home to men, women and children.
Last night, I gave about an hour of my time to sit and have a dinner that four of our Village folks had prepared. I held a four week old fussy baby so her mom and dad could have a short break. (It was the least I could do.) I sat and chatted with the folks, pretty much like I would sit and chat with friends over my own dinner table at home. Except that we all knew they were homeless. I would go back to my nice comfy home, and they would be sleeping on blow up beds on a church floor. One of them who has been in the program for a couple of months now, looked at a house yesterday and is hoping to rent it on Monday. Another talked about what life was like back when she had a home.
After awhile, I was relieved, from my shift, by Pat, a Village member, who came to spend the night. I went to pick up my daughter at her school dance, and went back to my busy life of privilege.
I went back to my life. However, Family Promise cannot provide housing for homeless families without the 6 of us that night, multiplied by countless others on all the other nights of the year. And that is just for one network in Toledo. It takes a lot of Villages to provide emergency shelter for all the homeless people, especially in this economy. It was inconvenient for me to rearrange my schedule to be there on Saturday night. But, I guess being homeless is pretty inconvenient too.
I ran into Val and Maria, who are members of The Village, earlier in the afternoon. They were buying catsup to go with the meatloaf Maria was making, because they did not have any catsup at home. I guess they might have preferred to be doing something else with their Saturday afternoon.
But here is the thing: Feeding hungry people, and providing housing to homeless people, although it’s inconvenient, well. . . it’s what Jesus would do. Here at The Village, we follow Jesus and change the world. And actually, when we do it, it gives meaning to our lives.
I felt more human after going and spending some time with the families at Family Promise that night that were making a temporary home in some Sunday School rooms in a church. Because I sat and had a conversation with them, and I cared, and I knew that I was making a tiny difference in their lives. It was not a huge thing. But it was something I could do. (It did not matter that I was a pastor, in fact they had no clue that I was a pastor.) This one little thing I could do, put together with all the other little things lots of other folks can do, makes a difference in the short term so that hopefully in the long term, these folks can get their lives back together.
Sometimes, the world’s problems seem so big, don’t they? But they don’t have to be. We can break them down into small pieces. If each of us would give a couple hours of time, or prepare one part of a meal for about 15 people for Family Promise, it really DOES make a difference. If by the end of this year, everyone in this room gave just 2 hours of time or helped prepare one meal, it would make a HUGE difference for Family Promise. Could we do that? Because here is the thing: I believe that as followers of Jesus we want to stay connected to some of the most basic human needs in our community. Those needs for families are food and shelter.
“Jesus said: Don't run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I'll show you how. . .Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself.” (Matthew 16:24-26 The Message Bible)
In Sara Miles’ book Jesus Freak, she talks about the feeding ministry at her church. At St. Gregory of Nyssa they have a food pantry where every Friday they give away groceries to hundreds of people. Many of the volunteers at the pantry are folks who started out as folks who needed food from the pantry.
Her book is full of inspiring stories of real people whose lives have been transformed by their work at that food pantry. Here are a couple of those stories from the book.
“A tall Latino boy with a gold tooth was piling up tall, symmetrical pyramids of granola bars when I stopped by his table. He’d been working for hours, and his area was meticulously neat. ‘Nice job,’ I said. He looked at me shyly. ‘It feels really good to give food away,’ he said.
“That was the consensus: giving food away changed everything. . . .” (p. 33)
“Giving was the basis for authority in the pantry: people became leaders because they worked hard and took care of others. As far as I knew Michael had never in his life quoted Jesus—the greatest among you must be servant of all—but an ethic of service permeated the pantry he ran. . . . I tried to work as hard as [all the volunteers] did, but could barely manage to walk thought the church with a mop in my hand before someone grabbed it. ‘Sara,’ the volunteer would scold. ‘Let me do that for you.’ Bruce, a canny ex-Navy guy shook his head watching us. ‘Everywhere else I’ve ever been, people try to avoid work,’ he said, ‘But here, it’s like people are running toward the work.” (p. 34)
Giving changes everything. That is the message that I read over and over in the stories in Sara Miles’ book. I believe we want The Village to be a giving church. So I am going to make a challenge. Before the end of November, will you give your time to feeding someone who is hungry through one of our outreach projects? We have several opportunities planned:
- Last Sunday of October and November, there is a Community Meal at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in the Old West End. We help serve a hot meal to hungry people; prepare the meal from 2-4 or serve from 4-6.
- Family Promise, last week of November and early December we’ll be helping with this project again.
- Nov 6 at 10 a.m. we’ll be working with Food for Thought at the Downtown Library, outside in the courtyard, to pass out sandwiches, other food, and hygiene items to people in need.
We also starting working on plans this week, to provide food at Christmas time for persons living with AIDS across NW Ohio in cooperation with the AIDS Resource Center, for our Christmas Outreach project. I’m very excited about this opportunity.
I keep coming back to the stories in Sara Miles book about the volunteers in her feeding ministry. Over and over again, they talk about how giving to others helps them find healing in their own broken lives. “Giving changes everything,” they say. I know in my own life this is true, many of you have told me the same thing. I’m inviting us to follow Jesus in one of the most basic acts of Christian outreach, offering food to someone who is hungry. Before the end of November, will you carve out the time to volunteer in one of our feeding programs? If we are really going to be church that changes the world, I believe we all need to be engaged every now and then in this basic work of seeing hungry people face to face and giving them something to eat in the name of Jesus.
In our weekly e mail list and on our web site there will be information about our outreach opportunities to feed hungry people. Or if you want more information, e mail me, Cheri(at)Villageohio(dot)org.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment