A Lesson

So, in early June, I posted about my mission trip to Chicago, and how if affected my life, and my thinking. Now, I am going to elaborate on one experience I had on that trip in particular.

On one of the last nights, my group went to the homeless shelter for the men staying there, who didn't have families there. The main point of our visit there was just to talk to them, and tell them about our lives, and try and see if we could make a differencce in their lives, or be a link in their chain. Which is exactly what we did. But, we didn't know that some of them would be links in our chains as well.

One of them who still stands out in my mind today is Fred. I first met him while I was serving dinner. I was putting cherry cobbler on someone's tray and the woman who was showing me what to do basically did all the work. I felt that I wasn't doing enough, but finally, he came and asked for some cobbler. He put his tray right in front of me, and so I gave him a couple scoops. He said thank you, and I felt really good about it for a moment or too, and then went back to waiting to serve somoene. After we had served, gone back to eat  dinner, and then went back to the family shelter to watch Despicable Me, we went to the shelter.

The walk was long, and many of us were exhausted from things that we had done previously. We finaly got there, and my friends and I felt awkward at first, because we didn't exactly know what we were supposed to do.

Them, Fred walked in, and we noticed each other. He asked to talk to me, and so my friends and I sat in a circle with him, and basically listened to his story. From the time that he was a child, he was bullied, which made him feel like he needed to do certain things to be able to fit in, or be okay. Those things ended up getting him into jail after a certain point, and he later became homeless.

He taught me many things. The first being that everything has a right to live. When there's a bug, never kill it, because it is a living creature and it has a right to life, just like we do. Yet, just because I'm bigger, I don't get to decide what right to life that creature has. He also taught me that anyone can become homeless. I don't believe I will ever become homeless, but neither did he. Who knows what could happen in the future? He taught me much more, but those two points were the key things that I will always remember from talking to him. Wherever he is now, I hope he's doing well, and living by the advice which he gave me.