Food for a Servant's Heart

     On Saturday, I went along with Vicki's mom and her family to the Ronald McDonald House that is nearby the University of Chicago Hospital in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood.  Helen had stayed there for over a month while Vicki was hospitalized in 2009, and she also had stayed for other, shorter times. 
     In effort to pay back or to pay it forward, however you like to look at it, Helen has gone back with her family crew twice now to serve brunch to the families in residence.  She does this to honor Vicki.
    Friday night, Helen and I made Valentine confetti and Helen dipped pretzels.  We put them in festive bags and her ten-year-old nephew Jake delivered them to the residents' mailboxes on Saturday morning. As people found them during the time we were there, I got the feeling some of these treats would be shared at the hospital.

     Helen has the gift of hospitality, and the residents were grateful for her menu choices:  platters of bacon, sausages, egg casseroles, waffles and muffins made on the premises, breakfast breads and fruit salad.  Her whole family worked so hard.  We were thanked by the folks, told it was the best they'd had, told it was so good to have a warm breakfast.  People seemed humbled as we took their plates to wash.  Some, especially siblings, were happy to give up this chore, others told us we'd done enough and they'd clear their own dishes.
     It was a mostly quiet room.  I didn't talk much to the people staying there expect to offer food or say good morning. One woman was seeing where her husband had been staying, "For a time." It was the first time he'd been able to get her to leave the hospital.  One man liked talking about the construction of the kitchen we were all standing in.  But one woman asked where we were from.  She seemed interested in what got us serving there. I told her about Vicki, about Helen and Jim's hope to start a foundation, "Living Victoriously," to help other college aged women and men with Leukemia.
     This woman, listened, and she told me her son's story.  He is 17 and missing his senior year of high school. He will live, as he is recovering from an accident that happened last summer. He was standing on the side of a highway, checking a trailer he had been pulling and he was hit by another teen driver who was texting and driving.  Her son was flipped up over a guard rail and fell 40-50 feet to a road below.  She told me, "Everything was shattered, not just broken, but shattered.  But he had no brain damage, and he feels blessed to be alive."  They hope to go home in March. 
     We both marveled at the facility in which were standing, and she told me, "You know, in our little town, I work at a McDonald's.  And all those years I watched people put their change in those little boxes, I never gave a thought to what these houses were like. I never imagined I'd be here.  But I'm thankful for their change, now."
     That was the mood of the morning, the prevailing feeling.  Though some parents looked exhausted, they were thankful. Though some had to be invited more than once to eat they were thankful.  We were thankful to be afforded the opportunity to serve.  I look forward to being so blessed again, and soon.  

The house chapel window

A chapel chair

And you know this guy, the clown who doesn't know enough to come in from the cold!

This is the house, obviously not a photo snapped by me since there was about two feet of snow surrounding the place. It is truly beautiful.