Christmas

Today is the day after Christmas. We had a great time with family, got some great new things we really didn't need but love anyway. My wife and I really tried to help our kids realize how much they have. Not just the loads of packages they opened, but in general. The food they eat but never think about, the cloths they have, even their health. About a week before I drove one of the students in our youth ministry home. He told me about how him and his dad moved to Susanville after they were evicted from their apartment and how his dad had lost numerous jobs. We drove by a rout he walked everyday to school at around 7am. I am usually out the door around 8ish, in Dec-Feb the temperature in Susanville at those times in the morning averages out in the teens and can drop into the negative double digits. 

His walk takes him about 10 minutes. The snow this night was about 12 inches. I could see his footprints between two homes up a steep hill. I asked him about the cold how his boots did in the freezing snow. He told me that the boots he was wearing he got from a friend of his at school a day or two earlier and that before that he only had some hightop converse. This kid had in the past come to the church acting as if he was starving, complaining that he hadn't eaten in days. Teens are full of drama and exaggerate frequently, because of this I would normally just blow him off and tell him to go grab whatever he found in the youth refrigerator. I wonder now how much truth there was to his drama, it made me wonder about some of the other teens I have worked with over the past 2 years. It made me so sad for him to realize the poverty in which he lived everyday. 

Our kids have no concept of skipping a meal, or getting nothing under the tree. Often even us as adults don't clearly grasp the reality of life that so many around us live everyday. It makes me so sad to think of other kids like the one I drove home who live in a world that we often think only exists in other parts of the world, or the country, or only in that other part of town. Depressing situations for people young and old exist right down the street. I really only realized it when it was right in front of me.