Running Late

Yesterday, two different little boys from two totally different events shared their treats with me, unprompted and pretty much unwarranted. The first, Luis, is in our scholarship program and I had never even met him until yesterday. We were having a little party and I sat next to him during the activities, joking with him and high-fiving him after he answered a trivia question right. When he won a pack of three lollipops, he sat down and immediately handed me one without a word. The second boy, Anthony, is one of my favorite children in all of Honduras. I see his mom for the mother's support/faith group I help with every week and he always runs to me and squeezes me when he sees me. I saw him while waiting in line for the sacrament of Reconciliation with the friars and he and his mom and sister walked in. I said hi to them and after we finished talking I turned back but felt a little hand on my knee: Anthony had pulled a small cookie from his backpack and as I faced him he placed

While walking back from mass one sleepy morning, I noticed a little girl in her school uniform about a hundred yards away. She wasn’t standing or even walking, she was running. It’s not too unusual to see kids running through our neighborhood, but what I wasn’t expecting was for her to be running toward me. As she came closer I recognized her as the daughter of a woman who comes to the faith group we hold for mothers in our neighborhood who have been abused, abandoned, and come from other unfortunate yet not uncommon struggles. I had played with this little girl--whose name I had never learned--for the whole of just one afternoon while her mom listened to a talk about healing and had a time for prayer while the group met. We played tag and laughed and I gave her piggy-back rides, and at the end of the meeting she went home and that was it. I didn’t really expect to see her again, and I definitely didn’t expect her to know or even remember me after just one afternoon of playing tog