overwhelming abundance

I had an experience this afternoon that shook me, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind.

My family spent the day here working incredibly hard (er, harder than anyone anticipated thanks to our rock solid clay soil) to help us start a deck. I went to Panda Express to get lunch for everyone. The nearby shopping center where the Panda is is a frequent panhandler haunt; it's pretty well trafficked and so especially in summer, people fly signs on the street corners there. I've never seen as many as today—from the man with a purloined shopping cart filled with belongings sleeping, exhausted, in the shade on a hill, to a life-worn woman with curly hair and a dusty vest.

But the people that really caught me off guard was the little family sitting on the median: a blue-eyed mom, two beautiful little girls, a six-week old baby in a stroller, and the dad, who held a sign saying that they had no job and needed to make their rent. I couldn't stop looking at them. Even if this was some kind of scam, I thought, you'd have to be pretty desperate to haul your whole family to a median and sit at cars drove past, drivers studiously averting their eyes.

I took them some lunch and some water bottles. The mother thanked me in heavily accented English. I went back to my car and cried. The car I sat in is our old car—old because we have a new, second car, one we bought because we could afford it and it was convenient. I drove back to our house that is so much space for our little family of three, whose mortgage payment we have never truly struggled to meet.

These moments in life truly pierce me. Sometimes I get caught up in scarcity mentality, worrying about retirement and braces for Kate and other far-off things that are so tangential compared to food and shelter. I feel paralyzed, wishing so desperately that I could somehow make a true difference for the myriad people I know and see who struggle.

There isn't really a point to this post. Nor is there a conclusion—except that life is sweet and life is bitter, and that I wanted to share the portrait of this family with you, because they are burned into my heart.