Compassion Weekend

You know how you wake up the day after some strenuous activity, and you often feel sore? The aching you feel when you make even slight movements, and you're pretty sure there's muscles aching that you didn't even know existed on your body? Yeah, I'm feeling that right now. Looking back on this weekend, though, the stuff that made me sore was for great reason.

Our church up here in NorCal has Compassion Weekend every year, where in lieu of typical church services, the church goes out to dozens of places to serve the community - and the world - through a myriad of ways. Whether you're packaging AIDS kits to send to Africa and other AIDS-ravaged places in the world, or painting an elementary school, or running a garage sale, or just plain running to raise awareness of human trafficking, it is impressive to see the variety of ways you can help, and that variety means there's something for everyone.

Back to the soreness: yesterday, Shelley and I took part in a 5K to help fight human trafficking. Now, neither of us are avid runners, although I regularly do the Wii Fit "running in place like a spaz" exercise. Human trafficking is one of those world problems that really gets to me: think of a cause that you personally feel your heart break for, and you can relate. Human trafficking is one of several issues that I wish to address directly in The Forever Saga, and it's been encouraging to see the cause become more prevalent in our church and in the media.

The running started well enough, but after a few minutes, I realized I had to go to the bathroom. Now, I pride myself on having a strong bladder, but when it's getting shaken up like a soda bottle with every step as I was running, something had to be done. Thankfully, a guy had just gotten home, and was walking across his front lawn as the hundreds of runners passed by. He was really gracious about letting me just enter his home and use his bathroom, and after that quick pit stop I was on my way.

As I mentioned before, I'm not a runner, so I found that I had to stop and walk periodically to rest my knees and ankles, which was interesting because every time I stopped running, my knees didn't want to bend, and I ended up doing kind of a sauntering goosestep-looking walk. One amazing thing that the 5k organizers did was to post signs along the route, each sharing a statistic concerning human trafficking. It was easy to motivate yourself when you saw that the pains of running paled in comparison to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of women and children who are forced into slavery and prostitution. Most of us hold life as extremely precious, whether we try to protect ourselves or others every day; when you run past a sign that says that the average slave is sold for about $90, you realize that the value and dignity or human life goes out the window too often.

The sheer amount of people running yesterday was a wonderful sign: about 400-500 people registered for the run, but at least a few hundred more joined in right before the race. There's something powerful about uniting with hundreds of others for a common cause. Volunteers and police officers have roads blocked off for you, and the entire neighborhood is aware of and supportive of the event...pretty sweet.

And so now, I am quite sore...but it's really like a badge of honor, to know that you pushed yourself to help bring justice and freedom to others.

I should mention that on Saturday, Shelley and I did another Compassion Weekend event, where we painted a school with our small group. You meet such great people when you do stuff like this: this awesome older guy named Arnie was so helpful to us, you'd think he was running it, but he was really this uber-volunteer who was incredibly resourceful, like a retired MacGyver.

We also had to clean off one exterior wall before painting it, which meant we had to kill snails and wash their droppings off the wall before painting it. Now, that is by far the most bizarre prep I've ever done before painting, but probably the most memorable!

With all that said, battling paint, snails, dirt, bathroom breaks, and sweat, it really was a fantastic weekend. The compassion of God is truly the inspiration for the words and deeds of world-changing people.

The Forever Saga Facebook Page ForeverBlog Forever on Twitter Forever on LinkedIn