Why We'll Walk

Can a couple of hours in a parking lot gain kids empathy, a feeling of belonging, and provide some relief for the homeless in our area? We're betting on it.

During our work on Kids Games this summer, it came to our attention that homeless people spend a lot of time simply walking. They walk from one service provider to another, from wherever they happen to be camping out to less isolated places, and they walk because people don't want them hanging around, and so call the police in order to get them to move on. With that much walking, and having no place to launder clothes, a homeless man or woman can quickly wear through a pair of socks or shoes.

Part of the work of Oceanside's Bread of Life and Brother Benno's is to distribute clean, soft cotton socks. Socks are cheap, but an important commodity for people who spend most of the day walking outside. That's where the idea for our walk-a-thon was born.

Kids who take the challenge will agree to walk for two hours on Saturday morning, October 3. The walk will be held in our church parking lot, and kids will raise sponsorship money, which will then be used to buy new socks which Bread of Life and Benno's will distribute.

Here are three tangible reasons you should encourage your child's involvement:

1. ...because they walk. In 1995, Robert Wuthnow identified some factors of community service that either did or did not increase empathy in teenagers who were performing the service (his book was titled, "Learning to Care". What is important, Wuthnow said, is that kids personally identify with those who are suffering. It's not enough to care about them in the abstract. The best vehicle for growing compassion is direct contact with the recipient of your care. This is why so many families in our congregation believe in the power of having their kids serve with them during a meal at Bread of Life. Seeing the problem is very powerful. If they can also hear what's going on in the lives of homeless people, even better.

So what can we do with a walk-a-thon to create empathy? Granted, safety dictates that our environment be pretty artificial. College students and reporters have immersed themselves in the homeless experience by actually living as a homeless person for days or weeks, and their accounts make for moving reading. But we can give kids a small sense of how long (and maybe, how boring) it is to walk for two hours straight, and then extrapolate that out to what it must feel like to walk for hours a day, and for weeks at a time. Will this short time window transfer into long-term empathy? We'll see.

2. ...to make connections within our ministry. Pre-teens are entering a developmental time when they are crowd-conscious and increasingly aware of their place in crowds. "Who am I?" is less a question that is answered in terms of observable, personal characteristics, and more in relation to "how others see me" and "where I fit" among peers. Events like these, which are less formally structured than a Sunday morning program, help break down walls and give kids the shared experiences that they can refer back to as they carve out a sense of "us" at church. You want that. Camps, sleepovers, bowling outings, small groups - all of these are venues for a kid to loosen up and fit in.

3. ...because service is a habit that promotes spiritual growth. A recent study that appeared in The Journal of Youth Ministry examined whether performing acts of service led to greater participation in what the study called, "Christian faith practices", or whether kids who were already serious about their faith tended to be the ones who performed acts of service. The findings are promising: those who were involved in ministry to their communities did, in fact, tend to have more robust spiritual lives - they prayed, read the Bible, attended services, talked about what they believed, worked for justice, and so on. We tend to program with those practices in view, that if we can get kids to "do Christian things" it will propel them to tangible expressions of their faith. The National Study of Youth and Religion in 2003 found that 50% of churched teenagers had gone on a youth convention or retreat, but only 30% had engaged in church-sponsored missions or service work. It could be, though, that the effect of properly-structured service opportunities awakens something in teenagers (and all of us) that stokes spiritual development.

I hope you'll encourage your child to gather pledges and come out and walk with us on October 3. It's about helping the homeless, yes, but it's also about helping them.