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Picture by Slack12
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A few weeks before my trip to the United States, someone came to our house by night and said, “There is a Hindu family with eight children, and they have gone several days without eating.” I took a bit of rice and went immediately to their assistance. The mother took the rice from my hands, distributed it into two equal servings, and went out immediately.
When she came back I asked, “Where have you been? What have you been doing?” “They are hungry too,” she answered. Right next to them lives a Muslim family with the same number of children. The Hindu mother knew they had been out of food for several days. She did what Jesus does: she broke bread. She broke her love and shared it with her neighbors.
One day I visited a house where our sisters shelter the aged. This is one of the nicest houses in England, filled with beautiful and precious things, yet there was not one smile on the faces of those people. All of them were looking toward the door. I asked the sister in charge, “Why are they like that? Why can you not see a smile on their faces?” (I am accustomed to seeing smiles on people’s faces. I think a smile generates a smile, just as love generates love.)
The sister answered, “The same thing happens every day. They are always waiting for someone to come and visit them. Loneliness eats them up, and day after day they do not stop looking. Nobody comes.” Abandonment is an awful poverty.
On one of our nightly walks through London, I discovered a teenage boy, with long, well-groomed hair. He was sitting, thinking. I said to him, “You shouldn’t be here at this time. You should be with your parents. This is not a proper place for you to be at this time and on such a cold night.” He stared at me and said, “My mother doesn’t want me because I have long hair.”
There was no other reason. A young man, a mere teenager, rejected by his own people, by his own mother! I reflected for an instant. “Maybe his mother is concerned about the hungry people in India, in Africa, or in the third world. Maybe she desires to meet the needs of all except her son. She doesn’t know that poverty, hunger, exists in her own house. It is she who provokes such hunger.”
That’s why I ask: “Do we know our poor people? Do we know how poor we ourselves are?”
A nation that destroys the life of an unborn child, who has been created for living and loving, who has been created in the image of God, is in a tremendous poverty. For a child to be destroyed because of selfishness of those who fear they may not be able to feed one more child, fear they may not be able to educate one more child and so decide that the child has to die–that’s poverty.
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Sunday night we took our college ministry downtown to work alongside Horizon Urban Ministries to serve the homeless. We split off into three different teams:
Kitchen Crew cooked up a homemade dinner with dessert.
Prayer Walkers went to nearby Balboa Park to pray as they walked (hence the name) and invite people they met to come for a meal.
Table Crew decorated the tables, set-up dinnerware, and served the meal when the time came. (This was my crew.)
I’m always nervous in doing new things. Once it came time to serve I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I knew what to do, but how should I interact with these people? What could I talk with them about? For a few minutes I wandered around the perimeter of the room, trying to figure out how I’d dive in.
I’ve seemed to adopt a policy to 1-2-3-Jump! Except if I give myself a 1-2-3, then I end up giving myself another countdown, so I’ve got to just jump. Like diving into a cold pool–you’ve just got to do it.
It was fun. I enjoyed myself and serving these people. I did spill water on a man and told him that’s why I’ve never been a waitress. For all my hesitation you know what, it was easy.
On the ride home we were sharing our experiences, for myself I felt I was personal, but not “Hey, how are you doing? Let’s talk” personal. I can really see areas the Lord is pushing me to grow toward–mostly making relationships with people.
When I came home I was prompted to pick up a book I had bought recently on Mother Teresa (Heart of Joy: The Transforming Power of Self-Giving) and it continued to open my eyes to the needs of these people and some of my own reactions. I wanted to share it, because I think you’d enjoy it (and partly so I don’t leave what we did Sunday as a memory).
Here are some excerpts that spoke to me:
- There are thousands of people dying for a piece of bread. There are thousands upon thousands who die for a little bit of love, for a little bit of acknowledgment.
- I am convinced that the greatest of all sorrows is to feel alone, to feel unwanted, deprived of all affection. It consists in not having anyone, in having gotten to the point of forgetting what human contact is, what human love is, what it means to be wanted, to be loved, to have a family.
- Our poor do not need compassion or condescendence; what they need is love and aid. But we have to be aware that the poor are worthy of love, that they are great. This will lead us to love them and serve them.
- St. John says, “If anyone says ‘My love if fixed on God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar” (1 Jn 4:20). Therefore, both you and I, let us turn our eyes to our families, since charity begins at home. Do we really understand the poverty of Christ, the poverty of our poor, of our home, of our communities? Sometimes it is hard for me to smile at my sisters. It is easier to smile at those outside than to smile at our own.
- We have thousands of lepers. They are wonderful, they are admirable, even though their flesh is disfigured. Every year we offer the lepers a Christmas party. Last Christmas I told them that they have a gift from God, that God has a special love for them, that they are very acceptable to God, that what they have is not a sin. An old man, who was completely disfigured, tried to get close to me. He said, “Say it again. That has been good for me. I have always heard that no one loves us. It is wonderful to know that God does love us. Say it again.”
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