Goodbye Reese
Two
eyes peered out from between the slats of the chair.
A tiny hand gripped the cold metal bar as he watched.
His questioning stare surveyed the room, searching for
an answer.
When he realized I’d been watching him, his gaze
fixed on me,
and held me there, motionless.
Intent and accusing, he read my tears.
He knew.
He knew we were leaving him.
As I looked deeper, I saw pain in his big brown eyes.
I saw the hurt and anger because we couldn’t stay-
and would never come back.
But we weren’t the first that had ever said
"goodbye."
Emily - age 15
"These
children can’t be contained on a piece of paper. Since I can’t
define them, please see them./ Look closely at these pictures. Please
see their smiles. Please understand that behind each smile is a story
that can’t be written yet, because the ending isn’t clear. I can’t
write about them because they mean so much to me, and because writing
about them makes me think about what comes next for them. Even though
they deserve more, their futures aren’t bright..."
Nancy - age 16
"A little boy walked out of the shelter carrying a basketball
half the size of him. When I reached down to get the ball–to see if he
wanted to play–he backed up and said "Mine!" Not that great
of a start. I sat down beside him and talked awhile, feeling like I
wasn’t getting anywhere. He started to walk away, looked back at me
and said, "C’mon." Gladly, I followed. Over the next days,
Devanie and I played together a majority of the time, but whenever I got
too close to something he wanted he would always yell, "Mine!"
The last day there, I picked him up and said goodbye. Just then another
boy came up and hugged me. Devanie saw this, grabbed me around the neck
and yelled, "Mine!"
Kyle - age 16
"Images of Chicago Hope 3 are many: serving men and women,
some wasted by AIDS, who have waited their turn for a sustaining food
allotment at Open Hand; four hours of exuberant worship with a
congregation rejoicing in their hope in Christ; assisting setting up,
feeding and cleaning up after a hundred and more hungry and homeless
people; packing sixteen hundred family food boxes in four hours; meeting
the cautious children at St. Elizabeth’s...the hard part about the
Chicago trip is not in the going. It is in the leaving..."
The Rev. Phillip Haug
"Every night we would gather to tell the
stories of the day. We had to. There was no other way to deal with the
heartbreak and the joy."
Andy Rutrough-Pastor
St. Thomas Lutheran Church
