Can God Work Through Extra Cheese Eggs?

Yesterday morning I woke up at 4am to the sound of the Allied Waste truck collecting trash from the dumpsters at the elementary school next door. It's illegal to do that in the middle of the night, but that company does not care. They join arms with plenty of other people who don't live here that come to Homewood in the middle of the night to exploit my neighborhood. I could not fall back to sleep so I decided to work on my dissertation for a couple hours. At 6am I felt prompted to cook a big breakfast with pancakes and cheese eggs, but I was not sure why. Usually that means God is up to something. Cooking helps me destress, but that wasn't what God was up to that morning. My wife and daughters enjoyed the food when they woke up, but there was still plenty left over. Of course, right at that moment, the doorbell rang and some kids from the neighborhood stopped by to visit. We invited them in for breakfast and there was just enough food left over to fill them up. One of them was on crutches because he had broken his foot. He had missed breakfast by rushing out the door, and he missed his bus because he was so slow getting to the bus stop. His mom was in the hospital because of her high blood pressure, so there was no way for him to get to school except by going over a mile on crutches. So, on that particular morning God wanted me to help a person in need. That's it. That's the profound life lesson. God wanted us to love our neighbors with breakfast and a ride to school.

Yes, I'm still annoyed that Allied Waste keeps waking me up in the middle of the night, even when I have already complained to them about it. But, life in the inner city is always filled with God's redemption of circumstances. What caused me to wake up early actually helped me to demonstrate Christ's love to some people in need in my neighborhood. I found great joy in serving my neighbors, and that is a feeling that many people in America miss out on. When we isolate ourselves from people in need simply by where we choose to live, then we miss out on God's mission to serve the poor and advance his kingdom. In America's individualistic culture, it is not convenient for us to build relationships with people living in poverty or even with our neighbors. So we don't, and we miss out on the great joy that comes with giving ourselves away to people in need so that Christ can be glorified. When we pursue the upwardly mobile American Dream, we distance ourselves from the poor, from orphans and widows and prostitutes and addicts and homeless people, from our neighbors, and even from our enemies, so that we can elevate ourselves in order to make our own lives more comfortable. That's about as far away from the gospel of Jesus Christ that I can imagine. And besides, who would we share our extra cheese eggs with if we weren't good friends with our close neighbors who live in extreme poverty on one of the worst street corners for drugs, gang activity, and violence in the whole city? There's no place I would rather be than to be available to Christ by living intentionally with my neighbors in need.