Outside of one on one in person to person visits, phone calls are the best way for me to communicate. Today I had a chance to visit two friends in the morning for coffee and had lunch with a friend of many years. However, I talked by phone with eight friends.

Since two friends have referenced that I would be losing friends if I persisted with my strong ‘opinion of truth’ on matters like the five million dollar store St. Vincent de Paul for a Thrift store, I have been thinking of who are my friends.

My friends today are quite different then they were some years ago when I retired from having a paying job. One thing all eight people had in common was that they were low income, some lower than others, but all living with poverty. I myself am a middle class economically. Many years ago when I heard that former president Jimmy Carter had asked University of Wisconsin students how many friend they had in poverty, I looked around my own life and found only one person.

My friends are people who understand me and accept me for who I am. I can be myself with them and I look at them as equals, not up or down.

Tonight Pat and I worked a meal at a local shelter for women and families. When we first started to work with this group at another location we were just there to provide companionship to women and perhaps some snacks. I can remember having some wonderful conversations with the woman staying at the shelter. When the shelter moved to its new and permanent location there was a floor for woman and another for families. We always chose to work on the family floor since there I could play with children and talk with parents, something I enjoyed.

However, over the years this shelter has become more institutionalized with more rules for families and less time for us to mix with people. The extreme was tonight when a staff member met us, people gathered at tables, the staff person introduced us as ‘volunteers’ and then called the name of the mother of each family to come up and get the food we prepared. As soon as families had eaten she started to have them clean up and for each family to go to their room. We came around 6:40pm and by 7:30 we were done and gone. There was no conversation with children and woman, just feed and go. In this kind of formal environment it would be impossible to make friends, at least for the night, with anyone.

I believe God blesses the persons in need, homeless and rejected with special graces and blessings. Not knowing them deprives us from sharing in these blessings. But I am blessed by my many friends who are blessed, like the eight persons I visited by phone and those I visited with in person today. With these kinds of friends sharing God’s blessing and grace I do not need as much from the homeless shelter.

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