I can hardly believe it was only a little over a year ago that I first walked into the Day Center. I had heard about Family Promise of Lawrence (FPL) for several years but never seen it in action. At the Day Center, kids were napping, playing on computers, running & jumping with toddler joy- like my kids and their friends. The moms were herding, entertaining, and diaper-changing – like my mom friends & I. The common human things shared struck me more than any “otherness.”
Now, a year later, I no longer see “the homeless” as some stereotypical group of people who hold up signs on Mass. Street asking for money. The “homeless” have names, faces, stories, and precious children. I began to learn a culture- as foreign to me as if it lay across an ocean. Ways of thinking about money, education, housing, and so many facets of life were unfamiliar to me. Yet, I identified with much in love and sacrifice for children, loneliness, depression, brokenness & redemption…. So different from me in life experience, opportunities, culture… but so alike in our humanness.
In the past year, I have listened to my kids talk to their friends about homeless people, correcting misperceptions. I have watched generosity grow, as my child says it’s okay to give up a treasured but outgrown item, only if it goes to FPL. I have seen my introverted husband help my kids and I host FPL dinner. It has been a joy to observe a friendship grow between my child and a graduate child. As I’ve tried to envision ways to minister and serve together as a family over the years, I’ve always come up empty-handed, until now.
I am so grateful for how FPL has impacted my family and I. We have given but have gained so much more. God uses FPL not just to serve those who are currently and recently homeless, but to minister to and teach the “givers” just as much, if not more.