Devotional by Todd Stillerman

Blessed is the one who considers the poor and the weak! In the day of trouble, the Lord delivers him; the Lord protects him and keeps him alive; he is called blessed in the land; you do not give him up to the will of his enemies. The Lord sustains him on his sickbed; in his illness you restore him to full health (Psalm 41:1-3 RSV).
In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father, who is in heaven (Matthew 5:16 RSV).
My daughter Mattie just turned seven. She was born into the family of the church, and much of her personal system of ethics and morality (to the extent that 7 year-olds have such a thing) was created and nurtured by her church family at St. John’s. I was delighted earlier this fall when she decided (admittedly with some prompting from her daddy) to participate in Charlotte’s CROP Walk for world hunger awareness.
CROP stands for Christian Rural Overseas Program, and the walk in Charlotte is the largest of over 2,000 walks held across the nation. Proceeds from the walk go to local and global hunger-fighting agencies. Mattie and I spent some time talking about why we were participating in the walk, and she started soliciting pledges with a passion. By the day of the walk, about 75 friends had pledged over $800 toward our efforts. We borrowed a double-stroller, strapped in Mattie’s little brother, Will, and headed out for an adventure. Our fellow churchgoers, the Perkins family, fell into place beside us along with several thousand other walkers.
All of this sounds pretty fantastic in concept, but here’s the catch: you actually have to complete the walk. The walk’s length is set periodically to match the average distance that people in underdeveloped countries have to walk each day to get clean water. Sadly, that’s a little over four miles. Mattie and Will were game and each walked over a mile, but long before the halfway point, I found myself pushing about 90 pounds of kid through the streets of downtown Charlotte. And it may not seem this way when you are zipping down the streets in your Ford Fusion, but downtown Charlotte has some SERIOUS HILLS! The pace was slow, and I was immediately grateful that I only have to turn on my faucet to get my own clean water.
Just as we made the mid-point turn at 18th Street, Casey Perkins noticed a woman collapsed on the side of the street. Casey is a nurse, and she immediately began attending to the woman, who we quickly learned was actually a girl of 19 with Down’s Syndrome who had failed to hydrate properly before the walk. Casey and the girl’s caregivers comforted the girl while the race personnel called for a paramedic team, and Mattie and the other children crowded around Casey with rapt attention.
The paramedics were slow to arrive. So slow, in fact, that I began to see the police escort at the back of the walk creep close and closer to us. It was hot, I was tired, and I had places to go at the conclusion of the walk. Casey had determined that the girl would be OK, but she wanted to wait for the paramedics to arrive. Three times, I nudged Mattie and quietly suggested we continue on. Mattie waived me off repeatedly, the last time with a look of disdain worthy of a teenager twice her age.
So … we waited some more as the retinue at the back of the walk passed us by. Policemen began pulling up the barricades on the side streets, and we were suddenly on a busy street in east Charlotte with no escort. Casey’s husband, Matt, urged us to go ahead and meet them at the finish. Will had, by this time, abandoned the stroller and begun tightrope walking on the curb next to oncoming traffic. I needed to go, and I needed to go N-O-W. I pressed Mattie to get in the stroller, this time with a father’s irritated firmness (and probably a little more). She shot me down with an icy look she must have inherited from her mother.
“Daddy,” she said firmly and with unrestrained conviction. “CROP Walk is about helping people, and we are NOT GOING ANYWHERE until we know that this woman has been helped.”
Mattie’s words throttled me like a George Foreman haymaker, and we stayed put. Five minutes later, the paramedics came, and assured Casey that the girl would be OK. We caught up to the rest of the walk without much trouble, and we even made it to our post-walk appointment with time to spare.
I suppose that Mattie is a Christian. My Baptist heritage tells me that, at her young age, she probably lacks the maturity and discretion to make an informed profession of faith. She has, however been raised in an atmosphere of Christian love such that she has no trouble grasping Christ’s core message. How telling that, in the midst of a walk for hunger awareness, I so quickly let worldly annoyances – the heat, my personal wants, a self-dictated schedule – overwhelm the most primary of Jesus’s directives. Mattie had it right: Christianity is about helping people, and that is what we are supposed to do. May we all approach our daily lives with that simple message in mind.

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