May 14, 2014
ShareFest
Last weekend 300 volunteers turned out for
ShareFest, a daylong event of community helping community. Originally the event
was promoted as assisting the elderly, widows and the less fortunate — pulling
weeds in the yard, painting fences and building entry ramps. From the believer’s
perspective there was great satisfaction in loving our neighbors and doing unto
others. Interestingly some larger projects that are now on the to-do list were
once done by service organizations and municipalities. Painting the high school
baseball fence, picking up trash along recreational trails, and building a
gazebo at an elementary school. All are worthwhile and appreciated projects;
however, “loving your neighbor as yourself” seems to have morphed into simply loving
your neighborhood.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----There is always as much to criticize as there is to honor in everything we do and are. Nothing is completely good, and nothing is completely bad. I used to despise ShareFest because we should not limit help for truly needy folks to just one week. We should do it year around. Yet I don’t find myself doing much of it.
-----I helped clean up a property across Townsend from the High School in the first year of ShareFest. All day there was Christian music playing through loudspeakers and intermittent announcements about the wonders of what was happening around town. It reverberated off the sides of the High School and bounced back across the street off the building by which I was working. I was actually embarrassed. I felt a part of a giant crowd on the street corner tooting a massive horn as it dropped a little, bitty mite into the alms-cup. Yet for all the showboating this was, in the activities of the week and the horn-tooting, too, was encouragement and inspiration for people to go through the year doing likewise (maybe without the tooting.) And people do help each other every day. It just isn’t so obvious, and they are certainly not always the same people. I even catch myself giving someone else a tiny bit of help occasionally.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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