He’s a proud man, his hands rough from a hundred rough jobs, but the roughest is to hold them out for change. He’s tired and he’s sick, and his hope died with his daughter in the cancer ward. He lives at the bottom because he couldn’t beat fate and the coming winter’s cold asks him if this year is the last and he shouts no through quivering lips and a shaking voice. And his prison, his tomb on the edge of the abandoned rowhouse bears one visitor. A curious little girl places apples and oranges at his feet and asks him questions that only a child could, and as he clears his throat to answer, she pulls the sandwich her mother made her from her school sack and she gives him half. And every day he gives her a crumpled dollar, never having it another way, because he is a proud man.
As a community, we share. We bond and pass between us everything from a dinner to the recipes of that dinner, and when we’re in fellowship with each other, we feel the spark that ignites the fire of the human condition. And when we reach out to those who are outside, cold and alone, we bring them a spark of that bliss, and the comfort makes them not just warm, human, a feeling denied far too often on the streets.
We can bring people into the warmth of our community. We can sit people by the hearth of our laughter and share the embers of our lives to those who may come to count them as blessings. We can radiate our compassion to others, and in so doing, find our inner fuel.
We are a community. We are your neighbors. We are your friends. We gather and invite you to gather. We stand at the front lines as Street Soldiers.
Street Soldiers 