PS It would be cool to hear more stories from others… For those of you who like being tagged, consider yourselves tagged

One of my most beautiful dirty moments with Jesus was during LAUP…one day as I walked down the street on the way home from COA I passed a woman slumped in a corner next to our church building. One eye was swollen shut, bruised, and bleeding from a cut. She curled up around the garbage bags of her possessions, and had a rag draped over her head to block the sun. I went upstairs, warmed up our leftover pasta, grabbed a cold pack, and headed back downstairs. She was coherent, but pretty ashamed of her circumstance…she wouldn’t even tell me her name because she was so ashamed. I talked with her and prayed for her, and that seemed to make her joyful, but sitting there, pretzel-legged, on the cement of the sidewalk, flies hovering all around, abiding in Jesus’ love for this woman, I wanted with all my being to take her home with me. I told myself to remember what it felt like to sit with this woman, to see her eye black, swollen, and bleeding, to watch her dig into the pasta without the fork I gave her because so hungry… the degradation of this human life was so painful to watch, and it was one of the clearest moments of understanding the wretched dichotomies of this world. Every desire I had to use “my” money for myself dissipated, and for a moment I felt “delivered from the insanity of selfishness” (from a book called Prayer). I want to live as close to that feeling as possible for the rest of my life, and that means living with and loving the poor.

Oh and Eddie…this summer I’m going to Haiti to start an orphanage…I’m looking forward to some more dirt