The past few days my team along with Team Fuel have been working in a community known as the traveler
community. We don’t know too much about
them except that they aren’t really accepted into normal society and are thought
of as ‘lower class.’ The church we are
working with, Discovery Church, has a member who grew up in this community thus helping us have a better in. So, just the chance to
go into one of their communities is cool in itself.
Our goal in this community was to do odd jobs for anyone who
would accept the work. So the first day
we went door to door in small teams to just let people know what we were doing
and to ask them if they wanted any help.
After more than our fair share of doors being slammed in our faces, we
finally broke through and were able to work for a few wary residents. I noticed lots of curious faces peering out
of windows and doors while we did our work.
By the end of the day though, we had accumulated more than enough work for
the next day along with some help from a few neighborhood kids.
Because of the sheer volume of trash we accumulated the next
day we quickly ran out of trash bags and called for more supplies. During the down time we got to spend lots of
time with the kids in the neighborhood, which by this time were out in full
force. The kids asked all kinds of
questions: where do you live? What do you do when it rains? How many meals a
day do you eat? Where did you get your tent? How do you wash your clothes? etc etc. The questions seriously never ended but some
of them made me take a step back and think.
They kept asking why we were picking up trash- Why we were eating lunch
on their sidewalk- Why we were on their street- why we were doing all of this?
Luckily I didn’t field these questions because I probably
would have turned into a bumbling idiot.
They are such simple questions on the surface but that really is what it
is all about. Why ARE we doing this? The answer given to the kids was that we are Christians
and we want to love and help people. And
while usually the way you answer a question to a child is ‘dumbed down,’ that
is precisely how I would respond to anyone. It’s truth.
One of the little boys came up later and said, “when I grow
up I want to be a christian so I can help people too.” That’s why we do it. To bring hope. To bring change. To bring
transformation.
