Humility

City Team serves almost 8,000 dinners each year, each cooked and served by men in a drug and alcohol rehab program. It is

also a shelter to 40 or 50 men each night, although in the winter when it is bitterly cold 'they don't like to turn anybody away'. A "Code Blue" is named for the blue mats that fill every inch of the floor on those nights.

City Team also provides clothing to men and women and babies as well as baby essentials like formula, diapers, Q-tips, ointment, and whatever they can get donated or buy with donations. This town of approximately 35,000 has the second highest rate of teen pregnancy per capita in the . .

. . WORLD! After spending the morning sorting food in the basement and sorting baby clothes upstairs, we had lunch with the residents. (Dinner is open to the outside community.) Then we had a tour of the facility by Anthony.

Along the way, Anthony told us his story. He had been involved in church when he was a kid, and when his parents started fighting and separated he turned away from God. "If there was a God, why would he let this happen?" He didn't want to go home after school, so he would hang out. Then he started drinking a little on the weekends, then before school. Alcohol was too hard to hide and took too long, so he turned to drugs. He was trying to cover up his pain instead of giving it to God.

"My first job here at City Team was cleaning the toilets in the chapel. "Everyone uses those toilets. The public, the residents. It was disgusting. It was humbling. And that is what it is all about, learning to be humble."

After we said goodbye to Anthony, we went back to Chester East Side Ministries and met the director, Reverend Bernice Warren. She read to us from the Bible about a woman Jesus healed on the sabbath whose back was

bent. "She went to the synagogue because she wanted to be healed and the very people she needed to help her said 'go away'. They blamed her! It wasn't her fault her back was bent. Well, peoples' backs are bent for many different reasons."

I leaned over to Fr Dave and asked facetiously if she could preach too. He told me she had come to Trinity Ambler to preach and raise money for Chester East Side. The plates were passed and they had $400. She got up and told the people it wasn't enough! The plates came back the second time with $3,500.

On our way home we went into Philadelphia and ran up the 'Rocky Steps' at the Philadelphia Art Museum and stopped for ice cream at McDonald's. Dinner and showers at the YMCA, a meditation from Ester de Waal's book Living with Contradiction and evening prayer and it was bedtime. And now, finally, it is my bedtime too.

be peace