Catholic Herald Parenting™

	Lorenz and Friends

I was scrambling to get ready for work. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my children get on the school bus. Two minutes later, after the bus was gone, I saw Annie from next door running toward the bus stop.

Poor Annie. My heart ached. I'd have to tell her she'd missed the bus. I should tell her not to worry, that I'd take her to school on my way to work. But no, the school was three miles in the opposite direction of where I was going. Six miles out of my way and I was already running late.

Knowing that Annie came from a sometimes abusive family, I worried about the reaction when her mother found out she'd missed the bus. As the youngest child in a family of teen-agers she was often the brunt of explosive anger, yelling and sometimes even physical abuse. My mind reeled. Two voices inside my head battled. I could afford to be 20 minutes late for work. Or could I? If Annie's older brother was ordered to drive her to school he'd probably give her a tongue lashing all the way. Should I interfere in their family problems?

In the end, the selfish chicken in me won out. I let Annie solve her own dilemma and went to work.

That evening I was getting ready for a meeting at church when I remembered I was supposed to bring some food for Human Concerns, an interdenominational group that provides food, clothing and housewares for the poor and hungry. I pulled some canned goods, powered milk and macaroni out of the cupboard and tossed it into a grocery bag. I felt rather smug. At least I wasn't showing up with just one or two cans.

On the way to the meeting a thought slammed into my brain, "Think you're so smart, don't you? How much of a sacrifice was it for you to give up that food? Your cupboards are still full. But what about Annie?"

Why didn't you take her to school this morning? Now that would have been a sacrifice. You were called upon to feed her soul and you failed.

Later that week I heard about an event that happened at a neighboring church. The story began when the freezer at St. Catherine Church broke down ... the freezer that had 1,200 pounds of fish in it. The fish was to be used for the Friday night fish fry, but that was too many days away and the fish had to be moved, fast.

The pastor at St. Catherine called Marybeth and Lenny for ideas on what to do with the fish. Lenny immediately thought of St. Benedict the Moor Parish, an inner-city church that serves a free meal to Milwaukee's poor and homeless every night of the week. St. Benedict was always looking for food.

Marybeth called St. Benedict to tell them of their impending fish windfall while Lenny and some of his friends loaded the 1,200 pounds of raw frozen fish into his van.

But when they arrived at the inner city church, they discovered that the freezers at St. Benedict were filled to the brim with 400 loaves of bread.

Undaunted, Lenny simply called St. Francis Parish, another church that also served a nightly meal to the city's poor. The freezers at St. Francis were empty. So Lenny and his friends unloaded 200 loaves of bread from the freezers at St. Benedict and put them into the van. Next, they unloaded half the fish from the van and put it in St. Benedict's freezer next to the remaining bread.

Then Lenny and his friends took the van, still filled with half the bread and half the fish, over to St. Francis Church where they filled the empty freezers with both fish and bread.

A simple miracle of loaves and fishes? Yes. But more than that, it's a story about how compound problems can often be easily solved when the needs of the poor become a priority.

I learned a good lesson that week. Sometimes we're called upon to feed the stomachs of the poor and lonely. Sometimes we're asked to feed their souls. Both are important. I learned to listen to that nagging little voice within me a little more carefully from then on.

(Lorenz is a mother of four, who, after 30 years of parenting, is now an empty nester who spends most of her time writing and giving speeches.)