When my three children were growing up, we lived off food banks. As the youngest, Blake often waited in line with me, wondering what we might get. Sometimes we were disappointed. "People weren't very helpful this week, were they, Mum?" he'd say. Other times, "Wow, Mum, ravioli!" However, we were always given as much bread as we wanted. It was Blake's job to carry it, and he would trundle up to the car beside me clutching that bread.
Our Christmases were also of charity. The year Blake turned five, we were inundated from all sides: the food bank, the Salvation Army, a friend's church, a fourth grade class, even Safeway. The mounting presents under the tree marked "Boy, 7," Girl, 10," "Boy, 5," and "Mother," overwhelmed my children. Blake's big brother Phil--"Boy, 7"--sat on the sofa and sighed in bewildered dismay. "These people wasted their money. This is too much."
Charity was a familiar thing, and Blake and Phil accepted it as a matter of course. But when they entered school it didn't take long to figure out what their older sister, Heather, painfully understood about living in an affluent society. They stood in the food bank lines and took what they got, while other families simply shopped at the grocery store. They wore mismatched clothing, while their friends modeled Nordstrom's fashions. The constant disparity marked them. Would they grow up bitter? Become cynical? Would they make money their god, striving after material security in order to compensate?
The generosity of strangers held the greater impact. If the world was a harsh place, it was also a good place, and this was not lost on my children. The many kindnesses shown them over the years bridged their schizophrenic worlds of want and abundance. Blake may be compassionate because he knows what it means to be hungry. The fuller truth is that he's compassionate because he's had his hunger met.
The story of Jesus feeding the hungry multitudes with nothing more than a child's small lunch comforts me. Like that child, I trusted God to take my little and somehow make it enough. What I couldn't figure out was the remaining abundance. Twelve baskets left over? What would that even look like?
The answer lies in Blake's own words, submitted in his application essay. "I want to return the favor now that I'm in a position to help." Reading that, I suddenly recognized my abundance. Blake (and his brother and sister) are my twelve baskets leftover. And the little boy who carted home free bread and ravioli has embraced a bigger task: World hunger. Once a grateful child, he became a compassionate man.
Today, 32 years later, my children still feed the hungry in more ways than one. One of the most touching acts of kindness I have ever witnessed is of Blake squatting beside beggars in Bejing, rolling yen into their tins and speaking to them while I watched broken souls become human in the light of Blake's compassion. His big brother, Phil, has adopted a little Chinese girl with brittle bone disease. His big sister Heather has taken in a little girl from Haiti, orphaned by the devastating earthquake of 2010. Compassion is the hallmark of all three.
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