For more years than I can count, my wife Shirley and I have taken part in the Church World Servicesponsored CROP (Communities Responding to Overcome Poverty) Hunger Walk to raise money to help stop hunger in our community and around the world.
My mother conducted her own version of CROP when I was growing up. We lived a couple of blocks from the Wabash railroad tracks and hosted people passing through town regularly. The hobos who rode boxcars in those days always seemed to find their way to our house. Someone once told me that migrants would leave a mark on trees or sidewalks identifying a place where hungry people would be fed, but I could never find any such mark.
Mama never turned anyone away. It was the same when friends would show up unexpectedly around dinnertime. “Put an extra leaf in the table,” she would whisper to my brother, my sister or me, and then she would stretch whatever she was fixing—stew or tuna fish casserole or pot roast—to accommodate the number of plates. She didn’t have to coach us to pass up the potatoes if they were in short supply or go easy on the gravy. We knew the routine, even to the point of fibbing that we weren’t hungry.
The Bible often commands us to practice hospitality, suggesting in one place that by doing so we might have “entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2). Whenever I’m inclined to be less than generous with the bounty God has provided, I remind myself of something my mother told me as a child, maybe when she was feeding strangers on the back porch: “No kindness, no matter how small, goes unnoticed by God.”
Lord, school us in the doing of kindly acts,
Regardless of station or side of the tracks.
Taken from: "Our Prayer"
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