Generosity

A couple weeks ago Gord and I volunteered, along with about 50 other people from our Tai Chi club, to serve dinner at Edmonton's Mustard Seed street church. We had been looking forward to it for quite a while, and we really enjoyed helping out there. Hundreds of people who had waited outside in the rain for at least an hour were fed a tasty Chinese meal. Most of the people had likely been out in the rain much longer than that, since many of the people served by the Mustard Seed are homeless, a lot of them living in the "tent city" about a block away.

Everything went well at the dinner and all of us volunteers had a rewarding experience helping out our fellow citizens, but that's not really what I wanted to talk about.

Before we went into the church to get set up for serving the dinner, there were two people waiting around back to get into the kitchen with us - an older man and a younger woman. They were wanting to see how things get done in the kitchen because they were going to be serving a meal there in the near future. That was all Gord and I heard about the two of them at the time, but when we were at Tai Chi two days ago we spoke with another Tai Chi-er who had talked with the man and lady a bit more. It turns out that the two were father and daughter, and that the father was turning 60 soon and wanted to serve a meal to the Mustard Seed folk as his 60th Birthday celebration. Now that's generosity!