The passion my friend has for Jesus, for her kids and her ministry runs deep. I admire her because, while I am also fighting a war on poverty and neglect, she is on the front line. The stories she tells about her kids and their families are both beautiful and heartbreaking. On her blog she writes:
I am overwhelmed with the need to do something to change their condition. I am overwhelmed with the desire to spread my passion to all around me so that everyone is filled with the passion to help these kids. There are nights that I cannot go to sleep because I think about these kids and their needs. But I remember that God is the provider. He cares for them infinitely more than I ever could and His heart is broken for them too. In His grace, He comforts me. And so I write, because it’s the only form I have to spread this restlessness I have to encourage others to be aware and take action.
I'd like to support my friend and her ministry by encouraging you to visit the Passion for Puirty website and by sharing one of her posts in its entirety. Moreover, if you have a passion to help others, to change the world, but can't fight on the front line, I challenge you to figure out how you can help those who do.
The things that seem. The things we'd never know
If you were to see the kids that come to the Academy everyday, those kids that are in the Hand in Hand program, you would have no idea what their worlds are really like.
They come so put together that you would not know that that is their only pair of shoes and that the soles of their shoes have been worn so thin that you can see their socks right through. They walk more than 2 miles to school and the Academy everyday and then back on the days we can’t give them a ride. So when they say in their savings plan short term savings goal that they want to buy a new pair of shoes, it isn’t because they want one to match their new outfit- It is because they don’t have another other than the pair on their feet.
When they come to the Academy for lunch everyday, you’d never know that that might be the first meal that they had had that day, or the last meal that they will have that day. You’d never know that their families have had to go to the store and ask for food to be put on a tab for them because they don’t have the money to pay for it and there is no food in the house. When they say there is no food to eat tonight, it isn’t because they have not had time to go grocery shopping or are too lazy to cook dinner, but because there is no more money left.
When we say goodbye at the end of the day, you’d never know that they go to a home that has tin sheets for walls and a tin sheet roof that has more holes than covering. A bed that has a thin cushion for a mattress that is moldy because it got wet from the rains coming in from the holes in the roof.
You’d never know these things because they’d never tell you. You’d never know these things because we’d never think to ask. Because if we asked, if we knew, we’d be burdened with the guilt of not doing something to help. But the reality is that they know because they live it. They are far too aware and familiar with what it is to go without.
