Jim has this thing he calls “ordinary attempts.” To him that term means any little thing a Christian does to extend love and attention to someone. I call this “being human.” Sadly, most evangelical Christians I know — maybe even most Christians straight up — need to re-learn how do do just that.

One of the things I’ve been retraining myself to do is to pay extra careful attention to my kid’s school. It’s a public school and I pay for it with my tax dollars, my donations to the annual auction, sand this year a tutiton fee for full day kindgergarten. So hey, I should be able to take it for granted right? I mean it’s my tax dollars at work — I shouldn’t have to work there too, right? In fact, in much of my upbringing I learned that not only should I ingnore the public school but I should actually fear and loath it because it is run by…gasp…non-Christians. (Mom and Dad, don’t worry, you’re not the ones who communicated that to me.)

But you know what. I dig pagans. And I dig our local public school. It’s amazing! The principal is amazing. The famlies that are there are amazing. The teachers are amazing. (Do you KNOW what kind of challenges they put up with..and for what? Peanuts!)

Our public school, BF Day Elementary is in a fairly affluent neighborhood. But up until recently it’s been the target school for homeless families. This means that a lot of special needs resources have been centralized at BF Day. Recently, the No Child Left Behind Act screwed all that up, and we’ve lost a lot of support workers due to budget cuts. (Another example of a federal mandate not working so well on the local level.) Our social worker is beyond maxed, our translators are disappearing, and our staff is reduced. But the school is still 44% on free lunch program. (To qualify for free lunch your family of four has to be bringing in less than $30,000 a year or so. In Seattle, one person can barely live on that.)
Needless to say, a lot of our families are hurting financially. What to do? What to do?

Well, another family and I offered to hold a yard sale. We sent out a couple emails and the principal asked the staff to donate some stuff. Within a few days we had a porch full of stuff. So my family, the Gustafsens and a bunch of Monkfishy folks priced and sold and bargined our hearts out. Eden, Rosie and Cate whipped up thier best lemonade and cupcakes and charmed everyone who passed by out of a few quarters. The nickles and dimes started adding up. I was hoping to raise $100.

By the end of our one day sale, we’d raised $330 for BF Day. I was able to buy 30 backpacks for the lower income kids. Diane, the school social worker, wrangled up another 20 and a local church gathered up the school supplies to fill them. 50 kids at BF Day got the things they needed this year…things food stamps couldn’t by…things that made them blend in with everybody else. A Spiderman backpack. A pencil box with all the goodies. A sprial notebook with a shiny cover. Simple things.

There’s something I’ve noticed lately about my drive to do “charity work.” I used to do it because I felt guilty, or because I was the big privledged chick who could help some lowly poor family out. But now I have a different motivation. I want to support the families at BF Day because I love them. Because their presence at our school makes BF Day a better place. They make my children better people, and me a more well-rounded human being. I value their presence, and I’ll do what I can to help them succeed and continue at my local school.

I don’t know…it just made me really happy, that weekend of colored tags and two-for-a-dollar deals. And my kids were so thrilled with the whole project that they chose to shop for backpacks first before going shopping for their back to school clothes. And on the first day back to school I saw a kindergartener happily lugging around the Pooh Bear backpack we found for her.

I like being human.