A little story

I ran the summer youth program at the YMCA and had two particular students, Jimmy and Larry. Jimmy was a good kid with a single mother and little sister. He could be a real pill at times, but he always meant well. Some of the other teachers couldn’t stand having Jimmy in their classes because he would interrupt and question their authority. Jimmy spent a lot of time with me in the office because he got kicked out of the classroom more than any other kid I’d ever seen.

Larry had the same background as Jimmy. He was smart and had a single mother and little sister. But Larry was the angel of every class. Every teacher would comment on his behavior and how smart he was and would let him do things that typically would not be allowed. By acting the way he did, many opportunities opened for Larry, and he took full advantage of it.

After a year of seeing both boys in action, I began to see things that showed who they really were—not what others tried to imprint on them. One day, when Jimmy was alone and no one was watching, he spirited off to the kitchen. I quietly watched from a far corner to see what he would do. Jimmy opened the fridge, pulled out the big box of cheese slices and the box of crackers from the cupboard, and began to prepare them for a snack for the 120 kids in the program. I had heard from the other teachers that someone had been prepping the snacks for them, but they had no idea who had been doing it. Now I knew. This… was the real Jimmy.

I then saw Larry sneak off from his group when he had the chance. It was science day, and there were a lot of tweezers, magnifying glasses, and pH balance paper on the back fields. I saw Larry from a distance with a large magnifying glass in his hand. Instead of looking through it, he was concentrating the sunlight onto the ground. As I got closer, I saw he was scorching and burning worms that had come to the ground surface. He was delighted to see them scorch and then burn. It was a little disconcerting, really.

Fast forward

A few years ago, I ran into both Jimmy’s and Larry’s younger sisters while shopping. I asked how they were and then about their brothers. Jimmy’s sister blurted out, “You’d never believe it! He’s a priest in Madison, Wisconsin! We never saw it coming!” The reaction was quite different from Larry’s sister. She looked at the floor and said, just above a whisper, “Larry got high one night and murdered the entire family he was staying with. He’s on death row right now in Texas.”

In the readings, we hear about being physically “clean” and “unclean” (Leviticus 13). We hear what safeguards society took to ensure everyone’s safety from being physically unclean and how to prove a change of state—from being physically unclean to clean. But the Old Testament deals only with the physical. Paul, in 1 Corinthians (10 and 11), points out that being clean has little to do with what we eat or drink. He asks if what we are doing is pleasing to God. Notice, it’s not about what others think or see, but what we are actually doing that matters to God. By example, Jesus was “moved with pity” when the leper knelt at his feet and begged, “If you wish, you can make me clean” (Mark 1:40). Jesus wasn’t looking at the outside. He was reading the desire through the man’s actions.

As we move into Lent, we have the opportunity to be “moved with pity” for those around us. To do so, we need to read the actions and not the words of others. So, what is the one thing you can do for someone that will make a change in their life? Or better put, what snacks can we secretly prepare for our neighbor?

Copyright 2024 Ben Bongers