Experiences

Well, I have been discovering a lot of my faithful blog readers and I am very grateful to you all. I understand now that I must continue on my weekly blog or my readers will become disgruntled. So I am here to satisfy the public.

I have a lot that I could write about today. School started and I think it is the greatest thing to see all of the students that are here. NCA is an incredible school. My wife is teaching kindergarten, and I could write an entire blog on why I could never be a Kindergarten teacher and the amazing patience that it takes to do that job. We have a big event coming up called Fusion Fest and I could write on all of the details and the opening doors of the event. However, I have something else entirely to blog about today.

Last Saturday I went to Kissimmee, Florida and volunteered at a place called Give Kids the World. This is a huge theme park like resort for terminally ill children and their families and it is usually one of the last stops on the journey of life for most of these kids.

I was real nervous going, and to be quite honest when Cindy Beasley asked us to go I wanted to find any reason not to go. After all, there was a Bucs game on during that time frame. But how could you possibly say no to that. Knowing that there are children who are dying and we have a chance to fill their last days with just a little bit of happiness; I kept on telling Heather that we just can't say no.

So we met last Saturday with a group of about 15 church goers and a handful of incredible youth and we went. My job was pretty easy I was to team with my awesome wife and two of our youth and we were to bus tables for half of the dining room. We were to clean off the tables, put away the dishes, and we were to help people with their trays to the tables.

I worked in restaurants while I was in college and so this job seemed great to me. I really loved the work and I really loved the satisfaction of helping out and I really loved partnering with my wife. I had a great time.

Having a great time at a place like that made me feel guilty though. How can I have a great time knowing that so many people in this place were struggling so badly. But the thing is that Give Kids the World was a happy place. The people that work and volunteer there go out of there way to make the families week the best of their lives, to give them some happy memories to cling onto when the times get rough.

As we watched people coming into the Gingerbread House we were told that the kids wearing the buttons were the ones that were terminally ill. Some kids had no hair or were in wheelchairs, but a lot of them you would never know by looking at them that anything was wrong with them. We sang happy birthday to this boy that was turning 12. We joked around with a lot of the people. We offered to take trays for the ones who looked like they might need help, but most of them politely refused my help. I was amazed at all of the people that came in for dinner that night.

I became the primary dish scraper of my group and I was okay with that. My team would bring a tray full of dirty dishes to me and I would scrape off the food and organize the dishes and send them back to the dish room where their were people to wash the dishes.

On a couple of occasions a lady had a few words to say about a few of the things that I was doing wrong and a few things that our church was doing wrong. I very politely accepted the criticism and informed my team if we had something we needed to change. This lady apparently felt bad about chastising me so harshly and she came to apologize to me. I said it was okay and by the end of the night I found out a lot about this lady.

I am very bad with names so I don't remember what her name was but she was 70 years old. She looked 50. She said that she works taking care of an old man (this is a 70 year old talking remember) and then she cleans houses as her main source of income. And three nights a week she goes to Give Kids the World and she leads the kitchen crew, which is made up of paid employees from Perkins who almost all have some sort of affliction, whether it is that they are bipolar or autistic or something like that. Here is the kicker... she has been volunteering in that kitchen three nights a week for 19 years. Yes I said it... 19 years! Which, to make my readers feel old, was when I was 6. I couldn't believe the work ethic of this lady.

At the end of the night, just like at any restaurant we all were standing around waiting for the final people in the place to stop talking and leave. There was a big round table with a bunch of Spanish people and one of the kitchen workers was over there chatting it up with them. I have not watched Telemundo enough yet to know exactly what was being said, but I was a little bit frustrated because I was ready to go home.

I would soon feel bad about that. The man came over to me after the people left and told me that he was sharing Jesus with them. He told me that every night he shares Jesus with at least one or two families and that is the only reason he helps out in the kitchen. When I asked him how this particular family responded he looked me in the eye with an air of confidence that we all should have and said, "Who could say no?" The man's name was Israel and I look forward to meeting him again one day soon.

My fellow readers there are many people who need us. Please don't put God in a box, express your faith freely and openly and with great pride because the God of the Universe is at work all around us... we just have to open our eyes and see.