So one of the hardest things in L.A. was figuring out how to make a difference, and even if you could. I think sometimes the problems faced by people there, here, and everywhere seem overwhelming to the point of inaction. Let me try to give an example. One morning, about 3/4 of the way through the trip-- a trip where we were mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted, where we hadn't had air conditioning in 9 days, where we slept on the floor every night, where showers were hurried (my quickest was 1.5 minutes long...) and where we were going hard from about 8am to sometimes midnight-- about half the team got up at 4:30am to go serve at a local soup kitchen. We had gotten home from an exciting pro-soccer game the night before at midnight, so few people had slept more than about four hours, and I personally hadn't fallen asleep at all. But nonetheless, all thirteen of us piled into the van and headed into downtown L.A., before the sun was fully up. We were driving slowly, in that tired-driver, tired-passengers, we-don't-really-know-where-we're-going sort of way. As we drove toward the mission where we were to serve, I saw something that changed how I looked at the trip, my life and the world. Lining practically every square foot of the sidewalks for blocks were sleeping bags, tents, shopping carts, plastic bags, blankets, clothing strewn about. And in those sleeping bags, those tents and those blankets were people, people asleep, whose earthly possessions were packed in around them. There were hundreds of people. And it's not that I didn't know that people were homeless, but there's something overwhelming about seeing them all asleep and realizing, without being able to deny it or ignore it, that this is their life. But how do you help all those people? Can any one person actually make a difference? (I'll get back to that in a minute, first I want to talk about the soup kitchen). I must have thought outloud about what I was seeing, because Ben, one of the leaders said, "makes sleeping on the floor in no A.C. for two weeks seem not so bad, huh?" I responded with "makes everything seem not so bad." And it did. We went to help in the soup kitchen, where we washed and chopped thousands of green onions and layed out 125lbs on bacon on cookie sheets. Some of the members of the team got to make homemade ranch dressing or do other food preparation. I also got the privilege of actually serving the food. It was an amazing experience that really opened my eyes to a reality that many of us don't want to believe exists.

Okay, so can one person really make a difference? I'll admit I've been tempted to think not, in my life. But I heard this story about a man walking along the shoreline on a Mexican beach. Hundreds of thousands of starfish had washed up onto the beach, and so the man was picking them up one by one and throwing them back into the ocean so they wouldn't suffocate. Another man came upon this scene and said to the first man, "Excuse me, sir but what are you doing?" The first man replied, "I'm throwing these starfish back in the ocean, because otherwise they'll suffocate and die." The second man said, "But, sir, there must be hundreds of thousands of them on this beach and this is probably happening on beaches all over Mexico and even more beaches all over the world. Don't you see you can't possibly make a difference?" And the first man stooped down, picked up yet another starfish, threw it back into the ocean and smiled, "Made a difference to that one."

Something to think about.