A little sample of The Big Project I’m working on…and a great memory.
I passed out t-shirts one by one as the kids lined up by size from X-Small to 3XL. We had a serious problem. One boy, from Lexington, KY, was a 4XL at least. This was our first Youth Empowerment Conference. We had a hundred teenagers from around the south gathered in Atlanta at the Simpsonwood Methodist Retreat Center. It is a serene 250 acre campus in Gwinnett County. Jesus Christ himself greets you at the door, the knob is his outstretched wooden hand. It is an astounding piece of wood craft. He is not on the cross. This is Jesus triumphant, reborn, and Simpsonwood offers visitors a chance at their own rebirth. There are no telephones, and no televisions. Deer wander tame throughout the buildings. The front desk has a basket of apples you can take, and feed them from your hand.
The kids are excited, and absorbed in each other, except one boy from Lexington. I can’t remember if he replaced another kid at the last minute, or we got his shirt size wrong, or maybe 3x was as big as we could get. It doesn’t matter. He would be the only kid without a red YOUTH EMPOWERMENT CONFERENCE t-shirt. As soon as we realized the issue, Tammy raced to Walmart and returned with a 4XL plain red t-shirt. This was an inspired move, which is no surprise. Tammy is an all in, all the time kind of person when it comes to the work. She came to the team by way of the shelter in Knoxville, TN. She was already a legend by the time we met.
This young man was 14 years-old. I saw in his eyes that he knew what was coming, and he was used to this. His shaggy brown hair bounced on top as he nodded in understanding, reassuring Tammy the plain red shirt was fine. He wanted to make it easy on us. I avoided his eyes, and passed out shirts until the ballroom was filled with clusters of stoplight red shirts, and one a duller brick red.
A counselor from the YMCA shelter in Louisville, Eric, was also passing out shirts, and when we were done he gathered the few extras in a bag and we walked to the cafeteria together. Simpsonwood puts out a proper country-style buffet lunch with fried catfish, mac and cheese, chocolate pudding, soft-serve ice cream, squash casserole, collard greens, all the good stuff. I held the door open for Eric, but he made some excuse and jogged off towards the parking lot.
We moved from lunch into workshops, teaching the kids how non-profits operate, and hearing their ideas about how to make the shelters better, where to look for street kids and how to talk to them. The boy from Lexington was easy to pick out in the room. He seemed OK to me.
None of us knew where Eric went. He was a conscientious guy, responsible and genuine. This was weird, and we murmured back and forth amongst ourselves about what might have happened. Simpsonwood sits in a valley along the Chattahoochee river. A few of us had cell phones, strictly for work back then, but coverage was terrible down in the trees at the bottom of the hills. We just had to wait and see. He’d been away almost two hours when he came slipping into the ballroom, kind of wild-eyed and harried. Tammy was leading the group. She was in the zone, waving colored markers around and flip-charting key themes as the kids chimed in over each other. I wrinkled my brow at Eric, silently asking him, “What the fuck happened?” In his outstretched hand was his wordless response, a stoplight red, custom made, official logo, 4XL t-shirt.
By the next session the boy from Lexington looked like everybody else. Eric skipped lunch to find a seamstress who could make a 4XL t-shirt from 5 other sizes. When you looked closely it was a patchwork of swatches masterfully sewn. He found an alterations shop, and told the seamstress his story. She felt his words, and dropped what she was doing to make it happen. Eric said he gave her $140. That was a fortune to a non-profit grunt in 2003. I’m not proud, but I’m honest. Even if I had it, I wouldn’t have done that. It was an astonishing act of grace. Eric retired recently, and I had a chance to tell him again what an incredible moment that was for me. He shrugs it off, not being coy or anything. I think it was all in a day’s work for him.
If you are going to throw your life away in the helping industry like me, understand these things. A day will come when you realize just because it was your best effort, that doesn’t mean it was the best effort. To quote a guy I’ll tell you about next,
“It’s not that you don’t care, you just care a little less.”
Juancho