In His Name

“I haven’t ate,” the young girl sitting beside me at church said tonight. She had been wriggling in her seat and frowning, getting tired as I was at the long sermon by the guest speaker, I had thought.

When I at last could speak to her, I said, “You mean you haven’t had supper?” It was past 8 o’clock already. She shook her head wistfully. “Your mom didn’t cook supper before you came to church?” I asked her.

“She couldn’t. She didn’t have anything. We lost our food stamps,” she explained. “We have some Ramen noodles,” she finished. I didn’t know what to say, but after church the child looked up at me and said, “Could you give us a ride home?” She had come with her brother, sister, and a young friend. I asked who brought her, and she told me, but said, “She only has three seats. There isn’t room for all of us.

Well, we had a small car, too, but surely we could work something out. “My mother can come and get me,” her friend said.

I asked my husband if we could give them a ride home. “I wish there was somewhere we could get you something to eat,” I ventured, to which the preteen said, “There’s Sonic.”

We managed to get the three kids in our back seat, although there were only two seat belts back there. “My mom doesn’t have any money,” the 7-year-old boy volunteered. “But she has a good job,” he went on. I asked where she worked, and he said “At the casino up by Ark City. But she just started.”

“My dad works with my grandpa, but my grandpa only made $10,” he went on. They told us their grandfather was a master carpenter, and their dad worked for him, as well as in a computer business he ran. The whole situation seemed strange, but the least we could do was get them drinks and hamburgers all around before we took them home.

I expected the children to eat in the car, but they wanted to take the food home with them. I will have to find out more about their circumstances, but it was a joy to befriend the sweet, polite children. Then I realized we’d just heard a message in church about the sheep and goat nations and the time of judgment predicted in the Bible, Matthew 25:32. Verse 35 says, “For I was hungry and you gave Me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink.” Then verse 40 says, “Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.” Thank God for the opportunity to minister to the “least of these.”