"Life is full of beauty. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces. Smell the rain and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams."
- Ashley Smith
"Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can- there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did."
- Sarah Caldwell
Day 2 for my mission team! Again the interns got up early and met them for breakfast and prayer. Pastor Mehl was pretty awesome in his talk today- I like how he ends the talk with "today is a great day!". After our team went to the shelter (Taskforce) to help out. The team met Anita, Maurice, and everyone else. We all got into different groups and I was in the gardening group. We went to the roof and Clarence met us there. It was so awesome to see how much Clarence cared about the garden- the little, teeny tiny garden that was barely starting to grow. He had such joy talking to us on how to build a bed and putting dirt and watering the plants. He showed the tomatoes (all three of them haha) and took them out to give to Ms. Anita. We could only do so much since we didn't have any material to build things so Clarence to us to the Art Gallery.
The Art Gallery is a place where homeless people can paint and whenever they sell a painting they get 50% of the profits. We met James and he showed us around. He showed us his paintings (which were beyond amazing!) and he talked to us about them. Again we saw the passion, just like Clarence with his garden. It just affected us all so much to see that everyone wants to participate and contribute to something- no matter how small. For Clarence is his garden, for James is his paintings. My group got to experience this too. They saw how smart James is when he talked about Plato and different ways of looking at paintings. I can say that we all admired him there. James just kept talking and talking about the different paintings he had and you knew he felt proud and he felt special to be able to talk to us. I wondered how many people give him the opportunity to speak about his passion?
We then gathered the group and went to the Varsity.. nomnom.. I got a salad haha. After we went back to the shelter and our group found a place to sort clothes. It was pretty tranquil the entire time. We left at 3:10 and waited on the rest of the group. While we were, a drunk man comes up and starts talking to us. I felt so bad for him because here is a man that can quote verses from the Bible.. really well. But then he said how he knew his mom wished he was never born. It was because of that that he didn't want to get married and have kids- to prevent the generation from growing. This saddened me to think that it's because of this broken relationship that this man prevents his life from growing. He also said he's an alcoholic. Another result of his broken relationship with his family. This got me thinking.. he knows the Word extremely well- probably because of the several ministries that preach to him while providing free lunch or dinner- but do they take the time to see that he's hurting inside? That he yearns for attention and love because he thinks his own mother doesn't even love him? Many don't. I know I don't sometime.. that's why we have to take time and really think about this sometimes. Take time away from our "busy" lives to love people. Sometimes it might feel like a job. But that's because we're not used to it. If you love to be loved imagine how the friendless and unloveable must feel.
Jenny Sample
No comments:
Post a Comment