Good morning, church family and friends,
One Christmas morning when I was serving a church in Gastonia, the phone rang. We had just opened presents and had breakfast, and were preparing to go to my parent’s house for the family Christmas gathering. The phone rang, and the voice on the other end sounded drunk — on Christmas morning, no less. He was asking for a handout. He was looking for a preacher, and had found my name in the phone book, and was asking for food on Christmas morning.
Well, I wasn’t going to give anything to someone who was drunk on Christmas morning. Lauren, my daughter, was overhearing the conversation, and she said, “But Daddy, we have all this food, and we can’t eat all this; we’ve got to take him some food, it’s Christmas!” So, Lauren fixed him a plate of food, and I loaded up the kids and the food, and we went to meet him. He said he would be at the corner in front of Quincy’s Restaurant on Garrison Boulevard; he said they usually gave him something to eat, but they were closed because it was Christmas.
We went down there, my kids and I, thinking I was going to find him drunk because that’s the way he sounded. However, when I met him, I realized he wasn’t drunk; he had a speech impediment. He was poor and alone on Christmas morning. His name was Henry, and he was hungry. I was being wary and careful, but there was my daughter’s simple answer: “We’ve got to feed him!”
It reminded me of a simple answer Jesus once gave his disciples: “You give them something to eat” (Mark 6:37). A minister once said to me, “It’s going to be a sad day for the church when all the people who were kids during the Great Depression are dead and gone.” I said, “Why?” He said, “There won’t be any care for the poor anymore. It’s the people who lived through the Depression who know what it’s like to be poor, and they’re the ones who are doing it. But once they’re gone, it’ll be all over.”
I don’t think so. In my experience, you don’t care for the poor because you were born in poverty; you don’t care for the poor because you were born wealthy; it is taking seriously the words of Jesus: “You give them something to eat.” We live and worship in the name of the God who gives us bread, eternal bread, that feeds the soul and does not perish.
So, feed us, God, and let us learn of you.
We long to be fed, but most especially, O God, to be fed by you,
Bruce Jones, Pastor Imagine Church
