I love this photo....Love it : ) ok, so I know it's not a great photo. It's a little blurry ( I still don't know how to work this camera). They girls look all disheveled. Clothes all mix matched. They were actually a little slap happy from the sugar they just consumed. But I LOVE this photo because of where we were and what we were doing as a family. I snapped this picture below our local food mission. It's elevated because it had flooded severely during Katrina so they elevated it one story when they rebuilt it. There's this little area below the stairs that's a perfect little hiding spot for kiddos, the only thing is it stinks like garbage. I mean really bad and that's where my kids were playing. So, why are they all smiles playing in a stinky garbage smelling below the stairs of a soup kitchen. Well, I guess it could be the sugar..... : ) No...just kidding, they really just loved being there. They didn't want to leave so they were hiding from us. Izzy has been going there for years, but it's still kind of new to Mari. We occasionally serve at the food mission and my kids have been exposed to that and it's awesome, but we don't ever just go there to eat. On this particular day we spent the day at our local street fair and we went to pick out a pumpkin. The weather was absolutely beautiful. Just a great day all around. The food mission is just around the corner from where the street fair was and God whispered to my heart to take the girls there for lunch. I know, that's weird. We're weird though so, it was ok : )
I expected the usually barrage of questions like "why don't these people have a home? ", "Why is that man talking to himself?", "Why does that lady have all of her stuff in a shopping buggy?". Izzy is quite inquisitive and it doesn't matter that I've answered those questions a bunch of times already, she always asks. Mari is just as inquisitive but much louder about it. So, I figured I'd spend much of our time there asking them to speak quietly and don't point. You know the usual thing you have to do with a 4 and 6 year old. What I wasn't expecting was my kids totally blending in with everyone (we didn't stick out like a sore thumb which we usually do), hanging out with the other kids, eating what they were served with no complaining (the food is sometimes ummm interesting...let's just say that) and thoroughly enjoying their lunch at the soup kitchen. We got to meet some very sweet people and enjoyed our time there together. So, we decided that we'd make our food mission lunch a regular thing.....donating what we'd normally spend on lunch at a restaurant.
Our local food mission serves 300 meals a day in our town. I started serving there about ten years ago with the company I worked for and when we talked to the church that we were attending at the time about having a team serve there regularly they said to us "we don't have any homeless people in our town". Huh? What a shock it was for them to learn that we do in fact have a homeless population and we've had a food mission for almost 30 years. Now, if some of the local church doesn't know that we have homeless people in our town than most of the people in our town don't know it either. That lunch reminded me that it's up to Rob and I to make sure that our children know. It's not an easy thing to talk to them about. It's messy and not pretty, but it's the truth. I'm going to make sure that my children know that we have people in our community that don't have a home. They need to know that people are hungry out there. They need to know that we are rich even if we're not rich by the standards of our American culture, we are still in fact rich. I'm going to make sure that they know that as a family we are going to serve the hungry and homeless. We are going to love them. We are going to pray for them. We are not blessed to just be blessed. We are blessed so that we can bless others. I was so convicted about that as we ate with people that lay their heads on the street at night. Some of them smelled bad. Some of them seemed crazy. Some of them looked pretty rough around the edges. The only thing I could think of though was if Jesus was on this Earth right now He would be right there eating with them at the food mission. That's good enough for me then.....
Matthew 25:40
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
No comments:
Post a Comment