Every Day Heros

Arnold Abbott is a 90 year old man with a heart for feeding hungry people. Unfortunately the people he wants to feed are homeless and in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida it is against the law to feed people in public places. Ft. Lauderdale is one of 30 cities who in the past two years have passed laws to outlaw or regulate the feeding of the hungry in public places.

These cities must hope that by being inhospitable to the homeless the homeless will just move on. Do they have any suggestions as to where they should move to? Aren’t the homeless also citizens? I am not unsympathetic to the sanitary and other challenges created by a homeless camp, yet the solutions are not to deny their existence or to drive them away, but to find ways to incorporate them into the community.

Arnold Abbott received a citation from the police and a court date. He returned to his previous location and continued to feed people. When he has his day in court he could face a fine and or jail time. If the jail time is based on so many days per person fed in a public place I wonder how long Jesus would have to spend in Jail.  

A visit to Rosa Parks Elementary

I had a great time at Rosa Parks Elementary in Woodbridge. We were nearing the end of summer school and the kids had a lot of energy. I read some of Henry then I played the game of asking one of the children

to come up. I had a desk and chair as a prop. I say, "So you arrive late and when you get to your desk your already there. At least someone who looks just like you is in your desk and all your classmates think the first child is the real child."

This gets a stronger reaction from boys than girls. I then say the teacher is giving a test and she decides that since they are identical they can work together on one test. All the kids holler. I play with it a little more having great fun.

The teacher had asked me to talk about the importance of checking your work and rewriting. So I had the following sentence on the flip chart:

The boy run really fast across the room, bumping into too chairs then fell flot on the floor buy the teacher?

They immediately catch the grammar, spelling and punctuation problems, though I really push them on 'too'.

We then went through and talked about how to make the sentence stronger. We gave the boy and the teacher names. We replaced 'ran really fast' with sped and replaced 'by the teacher' with at her feet. 

I gave away ten copies of Henry on Fire and gave everyone a friendship bracelet.

They sent me a great stack of thank yous.