For 8 weeks last summer the Greater Dallas Community of Churches arranged with the North Texas Food Bank to provide food to serve summer lunches to children touched by Mission Oak Cliff. Due to a reduction in federal funding for reimbursements of expenses associated with the Summer Food Program, the Dallas Public Schools cut the church-based agency from its list of food locations. Thanks to the Food Bank, children in this important neighborhood received good lunches daily.

    Luci Wayman, Director of Mission Oak Cliff recently shared a story from last summer about a four year-old boy named Jeremy:

“One Monday morning Jeremy came in early to see if lunch was ready. He said he was ‘starving.’ I told him we were preparing lunch, and he could eat with the other children when lunch was ready. At lunch time Jeremy was first in line. We were having spaghetti that day, and Jeremy kept coming back for more and more. He had four plates of spaghetti and was still eating when all the other children had finished and left the lunchroom. Then Jeremy came up to me and asked for another plate of spaghetti. I noticed he had stuffed spaghetti into his pockets. I asked him, ‘Jeremy, what are you doing?’ He said, ‘We didn’t have anything to eat this weekend I’m going to take some s’ghetti home to my little brother.’”

We didn’t have anything to eat this weekend...

    The economic engines of the nation operate today at a white hot pace. Times feel very, good indeed. I cannot recall ever missing a meal, except by choice or due to illness. Unemployment statistics stand at a near record low. Yet, children like Jeremy go hungry in the shadow of my affluence.

    On the one hand, I am pleased that because of the efforts of the Community of Churches to expand the Summer Food Program and to overcome obstacles such as the reduction of federal funding, lunches and healthy snacks will be served at over 200 locations again this summer. As a result, up to 25,000 children will receive free meals daily.

    On the other hand, Jeremy’s story stuns, sobers and horrifies me. Obviously, the economic boom thunders past many families with little or no positive impact on their lives. As our world tosses in the wake of high speed technological advancements. thousands of men and women need new learning. Several of my friends long for updated skills training so they can take advantage of so many amazing new opportunities. Our day requires new thinking.

    Jeremy’s problems with his own hunger and his little brother’s empty stomach are both individual and systemic. Jeremy is a person. He is the issue. But, Jeremy wakes up every rooming in a limited world, trapped in a web of poverty and oppression. I’m wondering: could our compassion for a little boy move us both to feed him a good meal and to take steps to change his world so that hunger will not be his primary challenge tomorrow?