Today was an awesome day spent with great friends in Modesto California. I'm staying with Mary, who just spent 6 months in Thailand working with Compasio in Mae Sot. I really missed her so I drove 5 hours up to see her and some of our friends. We hung out with Aaron (P.Mee), Chris, and Jimmy today, who make up YWAM modesto and have a really cool relational ministry with the poor. They have all been out to Thailand and worked with Compasio and met our kids, so it's really cool to be on the other side and see what they do here in the states.
It's really quite similar, and based out of simply loving and building relationships with those that are overlooked, ignored, or are "hard" to love. They are on a first name basis with the crazy guy on the corner holding up the signs ranting all day. They are serenaded by a lady with a beautiful voice who sings for change. They ask the homeless guy on the corner, how's you're back feeling? Have you talked to your mother lately? How's she doing? They hang out on fridays on the corner of 9th street, one of the hardest places in town, just at the edge of a trailer park and a crumbling hotel that is rented out on a daily or monthly basis. People with names and faces live in really hard conditions and may have come to the end of hope and are strung out on drugs, or selling their bodies to make a buck, but now they are becoming familiar with the faces of my friends who visit regularly and get to know their names and stories and call them "friend". And it's really a beautiful thing to see community being formed, and that they are really treated as our brothers and sisters, not just as "the homeless guy", "the druggie", "the prostitute".
After hanging out all morning with our vagrant friends we headed to the famed line up of Modesto Taco Trucks for an awesome lunch with cold cokes in glass bottles shipped up from Mexico and tacos and burritos. I was enjoying eating big ol' hot peppers with my carne asada burrito, and think unthinkingly rubbed my eye and it started burning! Arley, one of the homeless guys who's become a good friend to the ywam guys, started calling me Miss Chilie Eye, from that point on. It was really cool to be given a nickname by him and when we dropped him off at the lot where he's built a little innovative shack out of tarp and some scraps, he said "Real nice to meet ya Miss Chilie Eye." And I felt exactly the same way. :)
