This morning at my normal Friday routine at Wayside Christian Men’s Pavilion I spent time in the kitchen helping prep the lunch and dinner meals while my fellow friends served breakfast. Interestingly, I was prepping a huge tub of salad — washing and cutting lettuce, radishes, and onions while adding packages of croutons. I say interesting because when asked at dinner if I would like a salad with my meal my normal response is “No thanks. I’ve had my salad for the year”. I am not a rabbit; I am a man who prefers charred dead animal flesh to bunny food. But I digress.
While slicing the radishes, one of the drivers who goes out to pick up the daily donations returned with a black trash bag that they normally put the donuts and pastries in. He placed it on one of the kitchen counters as he normally does and headed back out. One of the kitchen worked started to process the bag and opened it….. only to find that it was a bag of trash. The guys immediately started getting on the driver that he made the wrong pickup (which could be understandable given that fact that there is no distinguishing the black trash bag with food from a black trash bag with garbage). When the driver returned, he deflected the harassment with a statement of “That was the bag I was given”. The blaming then worked its way upstream to whoever gave him the bag donation.
What got my attention was a statement one of the kitchen workers said — “That’s what society thinks of homeless people — trash!”.
While there might be some truth to that, I had to smile and verbally disagree with him. I said “Not all of us think homeless folks are folks are equal to trash. That’s why we are here”.
He immediately understood and it afforded a bit of solidarity that we are all a part of God’s creation and, to one of AA’s statements, we should all be doing our part to help others.
The rest of my morning was rounded out serving the second round of breakfast followed by prayer in front of the Louisville abortion clinic. It started my day out nice as I was able to return home and enjoy my last day off work before the New Year and a week going back to work.
…..Dan at aslowerpace dot net
