This past year I have often answered the knock at the door of my office and discovered someone with a long story, asking for help. Help means a few dollars. I confess, I am conflicted about how to respond. I listen to the story. I ask the person's name. I give them my name.
Most of the stories have a thread that sounds somewhat the same. Most of the stories are convoluted, too difficult to follow. Are the characters in the story real or not? Sometimes I walk across the street and pay for a room for the night at the motel there. One woman, after seeing the room I'd paid for for her, refused to stay there.
What is help, really? And is it really the grace of God that separates my life from these lonely people?
I don't believe that we "pick ourselves up by our bootstraps." It takes some privilege to even do that.
These days when so many of us are complaining that we have to watch our spending over the holidays, I don't know what to think. And these days, many of our neighbors are hungry. A woman overseas sits on the ground even as I write, flies flying around her head, her baby, hungry, in her lap.
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