the running reverend

Last week I was approached by a fellow that I greatly respect in our community. Stepping through our door and into our dining room, his plea was simple, “Josh, we need to give hope to the kids of our community.”

Hope was something that I had been thinking about quite a bit lately, so my ears immediately perked up.

What is hope? And what does it look like for our community? I desperately wanted to know what Butch had in mind and how I might fit into things.

Hope, we decided, wouldn’t come to the community all at once. It couldn’t, because hope, like most everything, must start out small and take root before spreading. For us this meant determining where the seeds of hope could be sown with the greatest possibility of taking root and eventually spreading.

A few moments later it became clear where that particular place was. It was amongst the males of our community, who fall into the 18-35 age range. Many of these young men need guidance; someone to care about them; someone to invest in; a community that is proud of them and that they can be proud of.

How do we do it? That was the question.

The answer that we arrived at was: Hope can come in a variety of forms, but the form of hope that makes the most sense given our context and resources was round, orange, and covered in little bumps. “Basketball” may be the name of the game, but the purpose of this game in our community will to give some young men who feel disconnected and purposeless something to take pride in; something to get excited about; something to let them know that we believe that they matter to us and to their community.

Tonight, as I was at our mid-week Bible study, Butch took our dream and shared it with the Mount Union Borough Council. A very excited Butch stopped on his way home to share with me the borough council’s vote of approval and their commitment to partner with us to see this dream become a reality.

Citizens of Mount Union, consider yourselves forewarned. Hope is coming. It is taking root in a strange and possibly imperceptible way, but once it takes root, I believe that it will spread quickly and in a number of forms.