The Center of God's Heart

When I was in high school, every time I couldn’t find something my brother and I joked that mom probably gave it to the poor and the needy. She rifled through our closets for unworn clothes and gave away our furniture; our jokes barely covered our resentment. See, I thought we were the poor and the needy. We lived in a trailer house. My mom was a 40-year-old widow with a secretary’s salary. I drove my grandma’s smoke-infested, 1970-something beast of a car. Yet still my mom found people who could use my old track shoes.

Today, my mom can fit all her worldly possessions into one room and lives in a house with women who walked out of jail 24 hours earlier. Her example and her genes must run deep. This summer, I’ve been doing a Bible study on the poor, and it’s not hard to see that those who suffer poverty, oppression, and injustice are right in the center of God’s heart. So I’ve been asking what I’m supposed to do with what God's teaching me, because as much as I try to distract myself with kids’ playdates and freelance work and trips to WalMart and my cute blond highlights, there's a strong pull to be meaningfully involved with people a lot different from me.

One of the last projects I worked on for The Navigators was a book about Neighborhood Ministries in Phoenix. It changed me more than I’ll ever know. NM started when one woman saw a need and tried to meet it. It began with an inner-city kids’ camp one week out of the summer—now it's a broad, comprehensive ministry that occupies a city block. For 20 years, the people of Neighborhood Ministries have looked around, asked people what they need, and provided it. Food pantry, thrift store, tutoring, preschool, mentoring for teenagers in gangs and with babies, job opportunities, and on and on. (Their website is full of info and provides the verses to do your own study on the poor.)

Then, through laughable, only-God-could-do-it circumstances, Kate entered our lives. Kate is a recent college graduate, a suburban Florida girl, who did a summer internship at NM last year and never turned back. Except to fundraise. No one really pays you to do the kind of work Kate will be doing—hanging out with kids who have almost nothing, telling them how much God loves them, reading the Bible with them, being the kind of friend, safe and unconditional, they’ve never known. So Kate’s back in Florida, looking for supporters who will love the poor with their money the way Kate loves them with her kindness.

Three days after we met Kate and decided to support her, we went to Las Vegas for a timeshare presentation. God’s timing never ceases to amuse me. For about the same monthly amount we were planning to give Kate, we could have access to resort vacation condos all over the world. Our “host” even offered to throw in an all-inclusive trip to Hawaii for our entire family if we signed up! I’ll admit he started getting to me with that one, but Kevin stood firm. I hope we will get to take some of those vacations one day, but more than that, I hope we’ll get to make an all-inclusive trip to visit Kate at Neighborhood Ministries. 

For now, we pray for her and all God has in store for her. The kids have started a "Kate Can," and during our dinner prayer,  Brooka asks God to "help Kate get her money real good and find people who say 'Yes! Yes! Yes!' " And I cry in my creamed corn. Because Brooka gets it. She and the other kids seem to naturally care about the things that are important to God. I have so much to learn from them.

(If you’d like to know more about Kate or how to partner with her, please e-mail me! If God’s been talking to you about the poor, you need to talk to Kate!)