Atl. 56-59.
So last weekend, after a cool, relaxing weekend in AL with one of my roommates, I got back to Atlanta Sunday evening, grabbed a bite from Wendy’s (caesar salad + spicy chicken sandwich = happy Russell). I had quite a thoughtful adventure later at night when I went down to the corner store for a bit as well… It really challenged me to think about what it means to love others and receive nothing in return, and the reciprocity of emptying self to the world and being filled back up by God, seen in the divine reciprocity, the holy “give-and-take” of the Eucharist. I’d love to share the story with you, but I think it’s one I may actually keep to myself. Some things are just to good to blab to the world :)
Monday, Jeff and I loaded up and went to Memphis to host a party with Steve Moses in the Binghampton hood, where SOS also works. Steve showed us around the neighborhood before we grabbed some BBQ for supper. The ministries in the hood have started restaurants for the impoverished to have good food, and community gardens for them to work in and be able to grow their own food in. What a great community! There were over 80 people at the party, in a tiny little house. It was packed, but it was a blast! We collected a ton of gift cards to go towards the Refugee Empowerment Program there in the neighborhood. Speaking of, I would like to formally state an apology for having NO idea that we had SO MANY refugees who flee to our country from wars and social problems in their homelands, and we shuttle them to cities and basically drop them off where they live in destroyed tenement housing and struggle to learn our language. To all of those who have realized this problem and are doing something about it: thank you.
Parker and Laura came over toward the end of the party once SOS’s chapel was wrapped up. It was GREAT to see some good friends; very recharging. They showed me around the neighborhood some more, and then showed me where Parker will be living this next year. I also saw the SOS building. Great stuff. I went back to the Rogers’ (the people who threw the party and whom we were also staying with) house for the night, and the next morning got to talk to Laura, the mother, for a long time just about her life moving into the hood to try and do good for those around her. It was a very powerful time of getting to hear stories of the community and what God is doing in it.
Tuesday we went to Tuscaloosa, AL for another party. There were quite a few less people at that party, but it was still a lot of fun (and a lot of good food!). We stayed with Eric and Melissa Hoffman, who were a really nice couple, so that made it a good night in and of itself.
Wednesday we drove back to Atlanta to work for the day. Graphic design-wise, I finalized all of the revisions to the Web advertisements for the Sojourners’ Justice Revival campaign, and also came up with 8 different sizes of 5 different downloadable desktop wallpapers in addition to some iPhone wallpapers. Is all of that stuff really necessary to run a successful campaign? Nope! But if you present a lot of content for people to be able to download and interact with, even if they don’t do it they feel like the campaign is even slightly more legitimized and that it is progressive and filled with stuff to see and do. Mmm… I smell a good, and free, marketing gimmick. I also edited a ton of photos from the parties, and have been enjoying learning a lot about Web dev. and stuff with updating sites.
Today, Thursday, I have been transferring files to Jeff’s external hard drive because, well, it’s my last day in a lot of ways. We’re traveling to Pensacola, FL for another party tonight, then Lakeland and Orlando this weekend, but I fly back to ATL on Sunday and then I drive home so… Not much time left. Wow. Fast summer. Only a few days left now.
Atl. 50-55.
This week was an intense amount of design output. Monday, I finished up two massive, retractable vinyl banner designs for the Sojourners’ Justice Revival event and Gisele picked them up from Sign-A-Rama and mailed them straight to Dallas. Justice Revival’s Twitter feed said that they received them and they looked great, so that was nice. I also started dialoguing with Scrappy Apparel to begin the ordering process for Green My Hood’s new shirts; now that the logo design is approved, I guess we’ll start putting it on everything. How sweet is that! I also made Keynote templates for the Sojourners’ crew to present stuff on for Justice Revival.
Tuesday I started on a massive project that is actually going to spill into this next school year, probably. Jeff’s new brand initiative, Plywood, is going to start manifesting itself soon in a format called Plywood People, a conjunction of a blog and a digital magazine with some pretty big-deal contributing authors on the blog, and the coupled digital magazine will be a monthly publication that features an unsung hero who is bringing justice into their communities, highlighting some of the people in the world who may not ever make the mainstream media but who are doing great things. I am going to be the designer for the magazine. So I spent the morning Tuesday researching formats and layouts for a lot of other magazines, taking notes, and then the rest of the day and night crafting a few concepts for the magazine. Here is a tidbit that I have learned about design:
Design is failing. Often. Until eventually you get something you like.
The majority of your first ideas, any time you are crafting a new identity for someone, are going to be garbage. Why? The first ideas are the ones that are predictable. The more you force yourself to develop new ideas, the more creative and conceptual your ideas get. Want originality? Try making fifty different designs for a project. By the end of the process, people will wonder, “Wow, how did you ever even come up with that?” And, of course, it’s because you didn’t settle for what everyone else would have come up with.
So by 2:00am Wednesday morning, I had a lot of different cover design ideas, and a pretty solid structure for some internal spreads. But the process was far from over. I spent the rest of the morning Wednesday at MetroMerge gathering a lot of visual inspiration pieces that had elements of design that I thought I could pull from for cover designs, and then I printed them out, laid them all along the tables, and then drew a bunch of new designs on the tables that brought the things that I liked out of the printed inspirations. So, by the lunchtime on Wednesday, I had well over twenty cover concepts for the magazine, and picked a few to craft further. Now, I think I’ve got some pretty solid stuff. A good process!
I spent the rest of the day (and night) on Wednesday designing and coding an English and Spanish splash page for Sojourners’ event, simple sites where users can submit their info to sign up for updates on the event until the full sites are ready for launch. Check the splashes out here: www.justicerevival.org and www.avivamientodejusticia.org. I definitely loved translating the latter into Spanish! :) That night I also went to the Braves game with Jeff, Andre, Keri and a bunch of the Catalyst crew.
Thursday morning I went to a breakfast meeting with Jeff to talk with Dwayne, one of the guys over the CanZion Institute, a hispanic institute that teaches music in 70 countries across the globe to better train the students, especially for worship ministries. A very good conversation to get to sit in on. I also got to craft some ideas for t-shirts for the Justice Revival. Some sweet ideas coming for that, I think. Thursday night I went to Freedom Park with a bunch of people to have gelado and throw frisbee and just hang out in honor of Andre’s birthday.
Friday morning I went and got Chick-Fil-A to have a bit of downtime for personal spiritual study with a good chicken biscuit and coffee. Much needed time. And then I shot some photography downtown and around the city just as a recreational break to recharge a bit of creativity and energy. Afterwards, I went with Jeff and the Blacksons (Josh, operations pastor at Elevation in Charlotte, NC, his wife, Angie, and their three kids) to Centennial Park downtown so that the kids could play in the fountain. We went for lunch at Little Ozio’s, and then I spent a good chunk of the day designing a lot of Web advertisements for the Justice Revival (we even are distributing our own iPhone backgrounds!). Friday night, Jeff grilled kebabs, we watched So You Think You Can Dance (yes, I do watch that show now; sorry), and then played Settlers of Catan. Busy day!
Now it’s Saturday, and I just got done presenting all of my work on Gift Card Giver for the summer to the non-profit’s board. I think it went well! They definitely enjoyed the bit about Cow Appreciation Day, and Andre got me a gift bag with my intern shirt in it (it simply reads, “IGSD” which… I won’t tell you what means, but is applicable because of all of the all-nighters I have pulled to finish projects; haha…) and a gift card to Chick-Fil-A (they know me too well!). I’m about to head to Gadsden, AL now to hang with one of my roommates for the rest of the weekend and then Monday I head to Memphis to start the CRAZY week of the GCG tour: 5 cities in a week!
Atl. 45-49.
Another recap! This week has just been WAY too busy to even have time to tumblog!
Wednesday, we received a LOT of print materials. I picked up the new shirts and the reprint of the old shirts, we got the three huge banners for Gift Card Giver, and we got a bunch of signage for Plywood. I stayed up all night Tuesday designing a 2’x3’ sign for Plywood to have at its booth, and spent a lot of the day Wednesday actually painting it and sawing it out (because anyone can PRINT a sign; not everyone will design it, and then make it on organic materials. THAT is corporate branding, my friend =). Wednesday night we set up all of the booth stuff to see how it would all look, and I photographed a lot of the stuff to update it to my Behance Network profile, as well as the Gift Card Giver site. Then I stayed up until 2 or 3 that morning designing a hosting a simple splash page for PlywoodPeople.com so that Jeff and Gisele’s Plywood business cards actually had a site that led to something. I also set up the Plywood store to sell all of their goods.
Thursday morning we were all getting ready for the big trip to Charlotte, NC for the first night of the Gift Card Giver tour and the first night of Plywood’s reveal. Gisele and Jeff were on laptops and iPhones the whole time. I was definitely dancing and singing the whole time, while driving. I got on to them for being too old to just enjoy a good road trip. We got there and had dinner with Scott and Kendra Miller at Briixx (great pizza!) and then went and had the party at one of their church member’s houses. The party went really well. The group of people that came were a really solid community, and I really enjoyed getting to know them. One guy said he was going to possibly hire me to redesign some stuff for his communications company, and Scott said he wanted me to intern for their church next year. Really nice folks. Loved hanging with them.
Then I had the privilege of driving back to Atlanta that night while Jeff and Gisele slept (they really don’t understand the concept of a road trip). I got a double-shot of espresso though, and so I danced and sang the whole way back; we arrived around 2:30am. So… That’s three all-nighters in a row. Needless to say: I slept most of Friday.
Saturday was a pretty crazy day. We were getting ready for the Atlanta party all day long. We had it that night at 7:00 at Blake’s, from Mathstik Media, house. There were a TON of people there: some really influential ones as well. I met the intern for the East Atlanta Kids Club, whom the party that night was benefitting, and he was a pretty cool guy to get to know. I saw a lot of other people too, and also sold a lot of stuff for Plywood. It was an awesome night. When I got back I was exhausted though!
This morning I went to City of Refuge for church. I didn’t get a good chance to write about it last week, but I went there last Sunday too. It is really an awesome ministry. It’s over on the West End in the ghetto, and it’s a huge warehouse campus that is primarily dedicated to a project called “Eden Village,” where the ministry houses single mothers and their children when they come out of abusive situations or homelessness. Now that is a church! And they also feed people in the community every day! So on Sunday, it’s almost not like a church “service” where its some strange ceremony for people to feel obligated to come to once a week; it’s like a retreat, and a celebration, of what they’ve been doing together all week long. And the church is the most diverse congregation I have ever been a part of: racially and socio-economically. There are rich white people from the suburbs that drive in, and there are homeless people that walk there. This morning, the minister asked any who wanted prayed over to come front during one of the songs. I saw a rough-looking homeless man in a cut-off Harley Davidson tee, and long, greasy black hair, leading a blind man down the aisle, arms around one another, to pray for great things to happen in each others’ lives.
In other words, today I saw the Kingdom. Today I saw the kind of love and brotherhood that I think Jesus meant for us to have all along.
So for the rest of the day I am working on some designs for the Sojourners’ Justice Revival in Dallas, TX this fall. And that’s fine; that’s a small way that I can be a part of something good being done for the Kingdom. But I am confident that I will be thinking of those two men helping each other come forward to pray, and how Jesus said that since the first guests invited to the Kingdom’s banquet didn’t show up, He was inviting all of those out on the streets. I hope that I don’t ever act like an affluent, spoiled man invited to the banquet first; I hope that I never remove myself from being among the impoverished. I hope that I will be out on the streets so that when He calls me to the banquet, I won’t hesitate to come in.
Atl. 40-44.
Friday, I started an account and relationship with a new online printer, PS Print. I’m usually pretty leery about giving expensive orders to online printers whom I haven’t worked with before, but PS Print looks like it can really deliver. They had really competitive prices, recyclable card stock options (important when printing business cards for an environmentally conscious brand) and a digital proofing system that was easy to walk through finalizations on. Plus, they had great customer service and credited our account back when I asked for combined rush shipping. So I uploaded the Plywood business card designs for both Jeff and Gisele to them, and we should be getting the cards Wednesday in time for the Gift Card Giver tour’s first stop in Charlotte, NC this Thursday night.
This post is going to be a lot about Plywood, so I better explain a bit more about that company first.
Plywood is the community of creativity that Shinabarger, Inc. (Jeff’s current licensed name for his consulting work) is soon to shoot off of and, in some aspects, morph into. And I think that this is going to be a powerful new change. Plywood’s tagline is, “An innovative community addressing social needs.” It is going to be a more-than-profit initiative (a for-profit company that backs non-profit issues) to creatively respond to various social problems. It is a “community” in the sense that it is going to “house” several different project formats: Plywood People, a digital magazine that I’ll be freelancing for some this fall that is going to detail a different socially responsible innovator who is impacting their surroundings in every issue; Plywood Goods, which will sell environmentally and socially conscious merchandise that benefits needy projects (one current example: recycled billboards turned into messenger bags and the proceeds go towards new houses for widows in Guatemala); Plywood Events, which will help market events and conferences that benefit communities. Sound too legit to quit? I think so to. I’m glad to be designing for and helping to brand the organization.
Plywood is going to be an official sponsor of the Gift Card Giver tour (which I will try and blog consistently about as I hit up all of the different cities), and so we have been working around the clock like crazy to get stuff together for Plywood to have stuff to show on tour. The business cards went to production Friday; Monday I worked on signage to display all of the Plywood Goods that will be sold, the Twitter account for the company (I do NOT like designing Twitter account images; they’ve got to figure out a better way in CSS to make the images span the page based on the browser size, not the screen resolution), and started construction on a BigCartel site to sell all of the goods online. Tuesday I talked with a local sign printer and got them to rush through the Plywood Goods signage so that I will pick it up tomorrow, and I also designed new tags that will be attached to all of the products that we sell, with a story of how an individual’s purchase is benefitting others (fact: marketing/designing is ALL about telling a story). I photographed all of the Plywood Goods and set them up on the BigCartel store, and tweaked the CSS for the store too. It’s still a bit in flux; as soon as it’s done, I’ll post a link. All of this stuff was just standard Photoshop and Illustrator work. Nothing fancy. Just getting more prepress experience.
The really interesting design project that I am working on for Plywood is based on the brand identity that I helped design, but is actually not on the computer. That’s right, I am now dabbling a bit in applying graphic design to industrial design media for overall experience design. The Plywood identity that I created is basically a glossy-white painted piece of plywood, where all of the chips and grain are showing through, and a green rectangle, multiplied in Photoshop to show the grain underneath, with “Plywood” branded over it in Zag Bold, also showing the grain underneath by soft lighting it in PS. So, this week I have been charged to create a sign for Plywood to go by the booth set-ups. Sure, you could just print a sign but… I actually bought a huge sheet of plywood, primed it, painted it, and then lacquered it, and am now reconstructing the logo in masking tape outlines over the plywood to make a big, organic representation of the branding. It is a long process and is teaching me a LOT about fonts, because I am having to pay attention to the math behind text: fonts are designed based on heighth, width, and angles, and I’m having to plot all of that out and magnify it for the display. Mr. Lark, my high school art teacher, always used to say, “Artists have to know everything. Art is science, and math, and philosophy, and religion, and…” And he was right. Being a good designer is much more than clicking on a computer.
Tomorrow, all of the printed Gift Card Giver materials should be arriving as well in time for Charlotte’s party. So tomorrow night I am setting up a Plywood booth and a Gift Card Giver booth in the Atlanta party’s venue on McPherson Ave. to see if the experience design is going to work or not. We’ll see, but I’ve got a good feeling.
Monday I also presented the Green My Hood project designs to Leroy Barber of FCS Urban Ministries and Mission Year and he loved the urban feel of the spray-painted logo, and asked for zero revisions! So hopefully we’ll fast track that project soon. The logo is done, we’re going to be printing it on shirts soon, and may do reusable shopping bags with the logo emblazoned on it as well. Look out for Green My Hood: it’s an environmental and social project that is going to go huge, I think.
Over the weekend I also created a Behance Network profile, and have already gotten a lot of positive feedback through e-mails and messages - even one request for a freelance contract this fall! So it has been a CRAZY past few days for design, but I have learned a LOT. I can definitely say this whole summer has taught me the ins-and-outs of PR, marketing, designing, and branding.
Now the question is: do I actually want to do this for the rest of my life =)
Atl. 37.
This evening after work, I heated up some leftover chicken for dinner to eat while Max sat at my feet drooling and The Postal Service sang a song about great heights. And when I had cleaned up and put everything away (i.e., dumped it in the sink and/or wrapped it back up in aluminum foil) I got in the car and headed downtown to the park behind Wachovia on State Street, where I mentioned, in an earlier post, many homeless people in Atlanta go to claim a cold park bench as their warm mattress for the night.
Dee and Richard (two Georgia Tech students) were already at the park and had all of the food set up. I got to see a few familiar faces, and chatted with them for a while. James was there, and his face lit up (rather, it always is; he never stops smiling) to see me, shook my hand, and we talked like no time had passed since we last hung out. Allen was there as well. I didn’t remember Allen at first, but he remembered me. He’s a cool, older fellow with short, salt-and-pepper dread locks, and speaks kind and funny words like he’s your grandpa or something. I met a guy named Rock tonight too, who was there with his wife. They were the sweetest couple; it was obvious that they cared about each other, from the way that she looked at him and he talked to her on down to the way they shared the same cigarette. There was another guy there named Slim. Dee had told me about Slim before, but I got my chance to interact with him firsthand tonight. And it was great. Slim took to me pretty quick. He didn’t really talk to anyone else for the rest of the evening, but continued to follow me around for a long time. It was a bit hard to understand him (from what I could tell, years of tobacco had made his tongue heavy and his speech slurred), but I got better at it as he kept talking. And believe me, he never STOPPED talking. Rock actually made fun of Slim when he tried to get a bowl of barbecue. Rock said, “Slim, you can eat, or you can talk, but you can’t do both.” Sure enough, Slim eventually just set the bowl back down and started talking to me again. He had Michael Jackson (too soon?) and Tiger Woods impersonations (and wasn’t bad at them). This was a pretty great thing to see, because Slim is basically a seven foot tall, super skinny, dark-as-night-skinned elderly man. And yet there he was dancing disco in the park. Eventually he left after the conversation, and he never picked that BBQ bowl back up. I met a guy named Shawn who treated me like a brother, and I met a guy named Tonio who wanted to have conversations about the psychology of the homeless. Tonio was actually a “regular” guy, who occasionally lived on the streets to get an understanding of what it is like for these people to live.
Walking up to this group in the park overwhelmed me with a sense of community. These people are so rich in their lives. Their faith is real because they know what reliance means, and their care for one another is genuine because they know that if they don’t look out for each other, no one else will.
In a strange sense, I almost feel as though I have found a church in the park on State Street.
But as great as their community is, the street comes with harsh territory. There was a woman there tonight who was bent on causing trouble. Allen explained it to me. He said that she had a severe mental illness, as well as a drug problem, and had even been to prison in the past. He said that the cops come and pick people like her up and take them to government facilities that deal with people with problems. But he said that the rich crazy people get put up in those institutions, and the homeless crazy people get put back on a bus and dropped off there at the park again. He said, “It is one sick, sad cycle of life.” So there she was, picking a fight with a guy named Mike. Mike wouldn’t fight her, but she was obviously making him angry. When Slim tried to give Mike a hand-shake, Mike attacked Slim. It wasn’t long before a fight broke out. Slim was trying to stay out of it, but Mike was after him. The woman took it as an opportunity to attack Mike, and before long they were picking up bricks and hurling them at each other. All of the others protected Dee, Richard and myself, and helped us pack up and leave. They wanted to take care of us and, though we wanted to do something, they knew that there was nothing that we could do to help the situation anymore. They said that eventually the cops would come, though that probably wouldn’t make things much better. As I was leaving, Slim gave me a big hug and soberly said, “Remember this: try and make the world smile. It needs it now. Because someday it’s all going to disappear anyway.”
Thanks, Slim.
I went for a really long stroll tonight to process some of what happened in the park. It almost left me a bit bitter because the park is so close to so many affluent areas, and those people have no idea what world they are living next to. And I was also bitter because of the crazy woman’s actions and how they escalated into a bad situation in the park. And I was driving home, still a little bitter in thinking about some of the hatefulness that I had seen that evening, and then the thought hit me, and it was as though God said it to me Himself: “She is my child too.”
I place so much emphasis on being a child of God. And I preach to suburban, affluent masses about being children of God. And for some reason it sinks in with us and we see each other as valuable souls who need to make something of themselves and love each other. But we look at crazy women in the park who cause fights, and even the nice homeless that are there beside her, on a whole different level. But tonight it hit me that my new friends are still out there sleeping in the park right now, and God is watching over them and wanting to be as present in their lives as He is in mine. They are not just people for me to help; they are God’s kids for me to show their Father’s love to. It was kind of a breaking point for me. We are all God’s children.
God, help us all.
And God, be with the woman from the park tonight. She has probably been through hell. And she probably has a long way to go still. But as bitter and angry and “crazy” as she may be, she is still very much your daughter. Please love her. And please help us love her, and to love the rest of the world, and to see each other as brothers and sisters who are all in desperate need of your grace and truth.
Let’s stop using and abusing each other. Let’s stop overlooking those whom we think are beyond help. Let’s stop passing by the Wachovia Parks in our lives.
We are all God’s children.
Atl. 36.
Got a lot done Monday.
Organized/finalized three different t-shirt orders for Gift Card Giver, and hopefully those will be produced soon. Still working on getting the GCG banners printed (how many blog posts have I said that in now?). Hopefully getting samples of different tote bag materials soon to verify what we want to print on for those. Definitely have learned the ins-and-outs of screen printing, vinyl production, etc. through all of this. Very helpful!
Got a few more cities verified for the summer tour through networking with the hosts a bit more, and the Flash invitations for a few of the cities are already up and running (as well as some Facebook event pages). I’m pleased with how the designs came out for the invites, but think that the overall structure of the Flash pages is… interesting? I suppose what I imagine and what I get don’t line up when I don’t know Flash for myself though :) But they work fine, and so that’s good to have finished. I also progressed a lot on Plywood’s logo identity, as well as business cards (very cool concept for those; printing on real wood slats).
Last Friday, just hung out in the city most of the day and night. Went to Chattanooga for the 4th to watch the fireworks over the river with my sister and brother-in-law in North Shore. And in every bit of free time I have been working on UPC stuff and Theta Nu Epsilon stuff. It’s been productive, but it has kept me all pretty busy. And school hasn’t even started yet. Yikes!
Atl. 33-34.
Yesterday was pretty normal. I worked at MetroMerge until mid-afternoon, and then worked at the house for a bit, and then had to go pick up some stuff downtown with Gisele for the rest of the afternoon. Design-wise, I worked a lot in Illustrator on the Green My Hood logos, and got some pretty solid, safe/modern logo sets done that I’m really pleased with. They are conceptual/abstract, but not too far out there. I used negative space by taking a square and reversing out certain spots to make what appears to be a white-picket fence stand out from the page, and there is a green vine stretching across the fence, thus “greening” the neighborhood.
Today was good too. I worked at the house all day. I made some logo concepts for Plywood in Photoshop. I played to the strength of the brand’s name and placed a long, green rectangle over a stock image of painted-white plywood (giving it a very modern look and feel, instead of just natural grain) and multiplied the layer, making the plywood grains show through the green box. I selected the edges of the different fonts and deleted the selection from the green box, so that the word “Plywood” was negative space that showed all of the wood underneath. I’ve always loved typography, but this project has really started making me think about font choices. I’m down to Titillium, Titling, or Zag on this project. They’re all very modern. I also made a new concept (the “far out/too creative for you” concept) for Green My Hood. It looks like someone laid down stencils for the words (but the font is ultra-mod and quirky, and the stencils are very angular and irregularly shaped) and spray-painted over it, leaving clean stencil lines, but a lot of spray paint all around them. I have several spray paint brushes in Photoshop, so I was able to do the whole composition without borrowing any vectors from online.
Ok. Now here’s the not-so-boring stuff I’d actually like to write about.
Jeff and Andre are out for meetings/dinner tonight, so I decided I would look up Chic-Fil-A on Google Maps and make the long trek up to the Old Fourth Ward to feast upon the greatest food known to mankind.
They say that they fry their chicken in peanut oil. I say that they fry them in the tears of the Almighty.
The Chic-Fil-A in the Old Fourth Ward is in a hospital, but I parked across the street at a gas station to just walk the rest of the way. As I was pulling in to park, an old man in tattered clothes and a too-big-for-his-head ballcap saw me. You know, homeless people don’t stop and talk to everyone. They watch plenty of people walk by everyday. But they always stop and talk to me. Perhaps I have “sucker” written across my forehead, and am unaware. But I waved as the old man started walking over to my car. I got out, and he immediately started chatting with me. But it wasn’t small talk - within a few sentences, he started recounting the Biblical stories to me.
All of them.
We talked about Solomon and all of his wives, and then we talked about Jonah, and then we talked about Noah, and then about Paul getting shipwrecked (“He had that snake come up on his arm and - ou wee!”). His name was Freddy, and it was obvious that he loved God; in between all of his Bible stories he would tell me parts of his personal life story, and at the end of every telling he would just say, “God is so good to me.” And as he concluded the conversation, he said, “Russ, if you don’t even pray for yourself, at least pray for me. Because prayer… Prayer can change everything.”
God, be with Freddy.
He insisted that we walk over to Chic-Fil-A together (“A man’s got to eat! And I love to eat!”), so we crossed the street and headed to the hospital. Chic-Fil-A was closed, but Freddy said that the hospital’s kitchen was better than Chic-Fil-A anyway. So we walked through the hospital and downstairs to the kitchen, and as we opened the doors to the café and the aroma of fresh foods tickled our noses, Freddy’s old, tired eyes lit up and he hurried me to the counter. He started ordering all that he wanted in his to-go box (which was basically everything that they had laying out, with “two of” more than a few of them). The box was bursting at the edges by the time he got his drink. When we rang up the grand total… Well, let’s just say it wasn’t cheap. Freddy said, “Oh, man. I’m so sorry. I hope I haven’t put you out.” I insisted that it was okay, but I kind of thought to myself, “I wonder if I can keep doing this for people…”
We walked back to the gas station, and started to part ways. He thanked me and blessed me, and said, “Not everyone will talk to me like this. Not everyone is willing to listen to me. I thank you for listening to me. And I thank you for the food.” As we were saying goodbye, a guy there at the gas station interrupted and said, “Excuse me, are you here with these people?” He motioned towards a group of snobby-looking white people standing around an expensive car there in the lot. “No,” I replied, “No I’m not.” Freddy interjected here, “He’s not with them. He’s with God.”
Thanks, Freddy. I think you are too, for the record.
“Well, in that case, do you have any change that I could have to get food for me and my daughter, Camilla?” the man (named Eddie) asked. “I see that you bought this food for this man, and so I hate to ask it of you, but if you could help us, I’d really appreciate it.” I told him I’d give him all the change in my pocket, and I did. I dumped the assortment into his hand and said, “Sorry, it’s not much.” He smiled really big and said, “No, man. This looks like a little over a dollar! This is great!”
God, forgive me when I get so complacent and, frankly, American that I treat change like it’s not that big of a deal.
Camilla was a little too ashamed to be begging to look at me, but Eddie shook my hand, thanked and blessed me and left. I said goodbye to Freddy, and got in my car. Then Greg knocked on my window and said he needed some change for the bus. I told him, honestly, that I didn’t have it, because I had bought Freddy food, and gave change to Eddie and Camilla. He understood, and thanked me anyway (and gave me a fist bump; cool) and we parted ways.
Wow.
There is so much need in this world. And I have got to be willing to open up and try to help with it. You know, driving back tonight, I thought to myself more about the issue of whether or not I could keep up giving to others like this. I don’t exactly make a lot of money. But I think that the real issue is not whether or not I can; it’s whether or not I can and still maintain the same standard of living that I have come to enjoy. And perhaps the answer is no, I cannot keep giving and have the same financial standards. But perhaps “having enough” has NOTHING to do with my standard of living - it just has to do with having enough for living. So I am okay with perhaps lowering my standard of living to bring others up to just the level of “living.” I got some cheap, greasy Chinese off of Moreland for dinner (God, please let that not have been sweet-and-sour cat), but I am very okay with that. And I think that I will enjoy my sucky dinner more, because I can know that Freddy is out there enjoying a box full of food, and hopefully Eddie and Camilla have got something to eat as well. And I hope Greg made it home safely. And I hope that all of those who are suffering and in need in the world tonight will be able to find some rescue and relief.
And I hope that you are willing to be the answer to their prayers to bring it to them.
