Nearly Robin Hood...

...except that you didn't rob from the rich, you just had to exercise your ingenuity to retrieve their cast-offs in a most fitting fashion. In so doing, you made my work life so very lovely this week. For I am indeed back at work, well into another school year. And while you lick your finger and lift it to test the winds of change over your own career-future, you're nevertheless flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, bonded to me such that it shows up in all places. This week was a prime example of how your desire to care for the underprivileged can be met through my own work contacts.




You heard me on the phone with parent after parent, discussing the ramifications of becoming a newbie band student. But then you heard the heart-breaker call. On the road, you would never have been able to do what you did for that mother and child.

A mother who works hard long hours, whose heart is pure and graceful, but who has very little in the way of monetary gifts.
A daughter who was excited, hopeful to be in the band, just like many of her classmates.

The little girl signed her name on the class list, requesting I make a call to her home. But when I made that call I learned this mom had finally told her little one no, because these instruments don't come cheap.

That was a few days ago. Then yesterday, when I came home from school, you looked at me with a gleam in your eye. "Did you see what I got?" you asked. Taking me into the living room, you opened the case to a clarinet, the very instrument the little girl hoped to play.

You were appalled that life should deny opportunity to a child who wanted to learn to make music, so you took it upon yourself to go to the nearby wealthy high school where our own son is a senior band student, indeed with dreams of becoming a third-generation music educator. You went there and chatted with the directors about the program I started last year...a toddler band program at best, housed at what has been touted in strangely glowing terms as a "hippy Christian school" with no budget and no reserve of instruments. You presented a need that might look ridiculous to those who worked in that lavish band wing: a myriad of practice rooms, rehearsal halls, offices; all bustling with hundreds of well-supplied youths and resident band directors. Still you stood there and told them about the little girl who would not be playing.

In fact, you spoke with such eloquence that the director took you back to a storage closet full of instruments. These orphaned instruments had not belonged to people with lives like that of the little girl. These people are nonchalant with material goods, so nonchalant that when their youngsters decide they are finished with band, the instruments are simply left behind. Neither they nor their parents see it as a grievous loss to have that investment abandoned.

So the director gave you one of the clarinets, free of charge. God is indeed good to orphans and widows, for He provided the tools for this child's dream to come true free of charge, I'd almost say miraculously although it depended on your willingness to be used. (Well, OK, she'll have to pay a buck for a reed and $10 for the method book, but that's considerably less than the $600 that this clarinet was worth in 1999, or so the sticker on it says.) The mom's response revealed her familiarity with the intimate care of God when I called to tell her of the musical "windfall" available to her, for she commented: "No...You're joking? Well, it's just God getting the job done."

How cool that we were part of it, got to see be involved in the whole process, from receiving the embarrassingly personal details of the need to receiving the idea for the solution: and then what's more, getting to be the hands that delivered the goods! How incredible is that!

In fact, I'm going to say it again, I think you are called to be some kind of channel for the reappropriation of justice according to some divine directive. And, what an exciting thing it is for me to have the privilege of participation in it with you.