If not us, someone, but will they care as we do?

I’m a barista at a little independent coffee shop in a tiny town currently, and I love it. I do. I’m ready to move on, and soon will be, but I love everything about it for now. Our regular customers are such characters.

There is one particularly interesting character named Mark. Mark is an older man, very businessman like, he’s a Christian and generally a real nice guy–albeit a little grumpy at times. But Mark is quite socially awkward. He constantly starts conversations and debates with random customers that are strangers to him. We generally shake our head and say, “Oh, Mark.”

Today Mark and my boss got in a random discussion about managing techniques and Mark listed off some of what he strives to do in his position of leadership. I semi-listened as I did my tasks, I spoke up at the end of their conversation and said to Mark, “What you’re describing is Biblical leadership, that’s why it’s working.” Mark looked at me, stunned, as if he’d never put that together before. He smiled, rambled on as he does, then sat back down. An hour or so later Mark comes up to me and just starts talking about this seminar he went to last summer about ethics, leadership, management, something like those. He said Bill Cosby, Rudy Giuliani, some other big names were there, he told me something that one of them talked about… He said they were talking about businesses and things that need to be done, and how if we don’t do something, someone will, but will they have the ethics and morality that we do?

If not us, someone, but will they care as we do?

That was it, this little tidbit that he said he felt like he needed to share with me.

At the beginning of this week I hung out with my friend and former roommate Mandi, I chatted with her about adoption since that’s generally what I chat about these days. Mandi and Dave-O want to adopt and foster kids in the future, Mandi told me that when she talked with her mother about how she and Dave-O want to do foster care her mother warned her (as nearly everyone does…) that foster care children are often troubled. Yes. It’s true. I know all too well how true it is that the foster care system is a hot mess. Corrupt, horrible people take in kids for money and they abuse, neglect, and even worse treatments to the kids they take in. Which is EXACTLY why good, loving, Christians should be the ones taking in these “troubled kids” that everyone is always warning us against.

There is a broken system. There is a world to change. There are lives to save.

And we sit. In our comfortable lives, believing the warnings outweigh the need.

Lord, break our hearts for what breaks Yours.