Homeless Children: Do Something Today

On FB this morning, friend Ada posted C. S. Lewis' beautiful quote about children not being a distraction from our work, but actually being our most important work.

The very next post (who says the Holy Spirit doesn't pay attention to FB?) was a story reporting record numbers of homeless children in the United States, which suggests that we've not done a good job at recalling C. S. Lewis' advice to remember the importance of children.  Common Dreams

The inspiration of a well-timed word is valuable.
But to borrow from the acerbic biblical writer known as James, If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?  So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.  But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.  James 2.15-18 (NRSV).

It is perhaps no accident that C. S. Lewis’ inspirational quote was followed immediately with a sharp reminder that we seem to have forgotten entirely the importance of children – everybody’s children.

So as we in these United States begin to be inundated with advertisements to buy more and more and more, maybe we might share some of what we were going to spend for the holidays for our own children to help someone else’s children – not out of guilt or shame (although there is that), but out of the realization that real lives will be changed by what we do or fail to do.

And those lives matter.

They matter to God.  They matter to themselves.  They matter (or they should) to us.

Here, then is a link to Charity Navigator, listing the top charities in the United States that deal specifically with homelessness.

They’ve done the homework for you.  All you have to do is pick one and make a donation.

I’m going with Caritas in Texas, simply because it seems the most acute needs are in the south.

How about you?

A Question of Miracles

In our time, we have to struggle with a fundamental question born of our sense of individual identity, of our increased scientific and medical awareness, a question of faith and a question of doubt . . . for some of us, at least, I suspect, it is ultimately a question of miracles . . .

Do they happen?  Are they real?  What do they say about God?  Why do some get them and others do not?

A long time ago, I was in a car accident and I got a miracle . . . for myself and for others there that day . . . that’s how it seems to me, anyway . . .

My car spinning on the ice out of control, I was ‘driving’ backwards headed into the oncoming lane of traffic at 60 miles an hour . . . others behind me were also spinning trying to avoid me . . . now, when you’re going backwards at 60 miles an hour there isn’t much you can do to save yourself . . . and I distinctly remember the realization that I would soon die hitting me . . . I took my hands off the steering wheel and prayed . . . I prayed that no one else would die because of my mistake . . . I did not pray for myself  because I thought my own fate was a ‘done deal’ . . . my vehicle came to a gentle stop in the median and the car behind me righted itself and the 18-wheeler somehow avoided hitting it broadside, which only a moment before, had been a certainty.

But ‘my miracle’ has not always been received as a story of blessing . . . as some have heard it with anger rather than joy, with resentment rather than appreciation . . . if what I got was a miracle, where was theirs?

Miracle stories leave some filled not with questions of wonder, but with questions of mourning: why not me?

In trying to get at the ‘why not me’ question, Stephen Jones says of the Tabitha miracle, "We do not hold the keys that unlock these mysteries. We do not know God's will as it pertains to Dorcas or to our loved ones. The helpful distinction is between praying for a cure, which seems to dictate to God our desired outcome, and praying for healing, which can come in a hundred unexpected ways. God's Spirit will intervene on behalf of our prayers, yet the healing that comes often surprises us and causes us to catch our collective breath."

I like what Jones says, but he is so 20th century!

For the fact is that the biblical miracle stories aren’t about ‘healing’ in our 20th century sense of the word; they’re about cure.

Our faith is a thing of mystery . . . and with this mystery, we do not know why anymore than we know how . . .

In our time and in our place, that uncertainty, that not knowing the why of it all, leads to doubt . . . doubt in miracles and doubt in God . . .

The challenge to us in the now is to live with this doubt, I think . . . to not discard miracles because they don’t happen to us . . . to rejoice for others even as we mourn for ourselves . . . and to understand that those receiving miracles do not have all their problems solved . . .

And so we are left with some simple declarative sentences, I think:

God is . . .

Miracles do happen . . . but they don’t bring a life free from pain or despair or problems . . .

C. S. Lewis once said, “Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”

But most powerful for me is the ‘testimony’ of William Sloan Coffin, who says that he knows Jesus performs miracles because he has seen Jesus turn beer into furniture . . . And only those who have never suffered from the effects of alcohol and alcoholism would ever doubt that it’s a miracle when that change happens . . .

I have never been closer to my God than in the mud and the muck and the pain and the sorrow of life . . .

God moves about our lives and our deaths . . . and we are changed . . .

Old or young, living or dead, sooner or later . . . we all meet God face to face . . . and we are never the same . . .

How could we be?