I love this quote by Francis Chan.
One of the things that I like about our church is the community it is located in. It is located in an area of town that is home to many different ethnicities and has a very large refugee population. Much of this neighborhood is made up of the people in poverty, people whom society has deemed an outcast, families that struggle to put food on the table, and children without adult figures in their life. It consists of people who want/need somebody that is going to come along side of them with no agenda other than to show love to them.
This last Sunday our church family went outside of the church building walls and served the community. Jennifer and I had the opportunity to be site coordinators at one of the apartment complexes in the neighborhood. There we would have food (bags of rice, beans, bread, etc.) for families and games and fun for the kids. We got there early in the morning to begin setting up and unloading the truck. Within the first 5 minutes, 3 hispanic kids came running up to us asking our names, telling us their names, and asking what we were doing there. We told them that we were there to hang out with them and that later in the morning there would be food and games. As we began hauling boxes from the truck to the area we were setting up, the kids asked if we would let them help us carry some boxes. I found it very interesting that these kids just wanted to be by us. They didn’t know us or if our games and food would be good/fun, they just wanted to hang out with us and help us with anything that they could. As we were getting closer to having things set up we asked them if they had any friends in the complex that they could invite to come hang out with us. They ran off and came back about 10 or 15 minutes later with more kids.
One of the things that I enjoyed most about the day was just getting to hang out and spend time with these kids. We played some games, carried boxes, kicked a soccer ball around, learned what school they went to, and got to see a little bit into their lives. We learned that some of the kids lived with two parents while some of them lived with one. Some of them had older brothers or sisters that had gotten into drugs. Some of them didn’t have many friends at school. Some of them loved school. The thing that caught my attention was that they all wanted to somebody to love on them.
One of the things that I liked about the way that they day was set up was that the members of our church went out there with no agenda other than to give those that needed food some food and hang out and show love to the kids. I think St. Francis of Assisi said it best, “Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary use words.”
A few pics from the day.
