Blessed are the feet

Today was our second day standing outside of Mack Elementary School handing out fliers and registering kids for the sports and art camps we are sponsoring next week. Although I didn’t have my two kids with me today (though they were awfully cute recruiters in their balloon-covered stroller yesterday), we still made for a surprising team: me, the pregnant white lady who speaks fluent Spanish, our beloved tutoring program director who just got back from language school in Guatemala, and one of our church board members, an African American woman who uses a wheelchair. Between the three of us we managed to meet, talk with, and register a good number of kids in the last two days, and tomorrow we are sure to get even more signed up.

It blesses me to see people’s reactions to us: the look of surprised relief that spreads over the grandma’s face when I speak to her in Spanish; the look on the African American bus driver’s face as he watches the three of us chat it up before the kids arrive; and of course the looks on the kids faces as they stare up at us with wide eyes when we tell them how excited we are that they are coming to our camp.

Doug and I were talking yesterday about salvation, and what the concept has been reduced to in our evangelical culture. I remember my own surprise in studying the theme of salvation in the Old Testament for a class at Fuller with Rick Beaton: I was overwhelmed by how much more communal and holistic it is than the ways we talk about it in our churches today. Standing outside of Mack today, I felt like I was a witness to that kind of good news, and it made my heart glad to be a part of it.