It's Divine Mercy Sunday and my husband and I are making our promises for another year as missionaries. This will be our fifth year as missionaries. It took us five years to get to the point of wanting to make that commitment and now here we are, our fifth anniversary as missionaries!
My husband Dave doesn't get excited anymore. He's a guy. For him it is like, "yeah, another year. Same as last."
But my heart stills pounds as I walk up to the altar when my name is called. The excitement of saying "yes" to God for another year. The honor of being able to serve His poor. And it gets better every year.
It's fun to walk through the mission and have people call out, "hi mama". They all think of me as mama because of the crowd of children I usually have around me. But I also think it is because I take the time to hug and touch and talk to people. We all want to be loved.
But mostly, they want to be recognized as a person. A human being. In a world where people walk past them all the time and don't even notice that they are there.
We don't just do it to the poor. We do it to each other. We are all too busy. Too busy to smile as we walk by. Too busy to say hello. If we recognize the person we are walking past, well, they might want to stop and talk, and we don't have time for that. Gotta meeting, gotta shop, gotta go.
Maybe I am going to be simplistic here, but what if we all started treating each other with a little more respect and kindness? Would we have less shootings? Less killing of our children?
If we started treating each other as human beings maybe we would start acting like one.
I don't know.
All I can say is that today, I will stand before God and my brothers and sisters, and I will promise to love and show mercy to, all I meet. I promise to see His face in all those I serve.
I promise to see His face........
I loved this post by the way. It reminds me of what I have been learning in my education classes and stuff that I have seen out in my observation hours in schools across Buffalo, specifically at Burgard High School, Business First's lowest ranking high school throughout the area. The teacher I sat in on barely knew the names of his students in the month of November! Three months of school and the guy still had no clue when he was taking attendance who was who. Anyway, my point is, as a future teacher, I am reminded not to look at my students as just another number or test grade. They are human just like me, and that means they have feelings. Even though I am going to establish my authority in the classroom, that doesn't mean I won't stop a kid after class to talk about what is going at home that has been bugging him/her or give someone a break if they forgot to do a petty homework assignment. Sorry I am rambling, but a PERFECT example of this that I think you would enjoy a lot being that you are so involved with people of the inner city is a movie called Freedom Writers. Watch it and then you'll kind of get what I am trying to say and understand the reason I am such a big advocator of classroom journals!
ReplyDeleteGreat comment, Joe. We have seen Freedom Writers, the whole family, and we show it at St. Luke's all the time. Good example.
ReplyDeleteI loved that movie Joe. Cry every time at certain parts. Very good comment. Thank you. You are going to be an awesome teacher!
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