Early last December,
our parish got a call from help from the social worker in a nearby community. There was, she told us, a fairly large (for our rural area) number of kids who would basically be receiving nothing, or at least nothing much, for Christmas. Their parents were broke, the safety net was tattered, and at any rate, safety nets don't provide things like Christmas presents.
The parish, of course, responded, because we're pretty good about that sort of thing. The word went out one Sunday, and the next we had the ingathering of gifts, which appear in the photo. There was nothing very grand there -- a good part of the collection was clothes (which I thought the safety net was supposed to take care of?), and the soccer ball for a nine year old boy that I was tasked with rounding up was one of the more frivolous gifts requested.
The point here is not to pat ourselves on the back for doing this. I like to think that any church if called on would do as much or more. The point, really, came up for me the following month in a conversation with the president of the local youth soccer league.
The club, it seemed, had received a couple of requests for scholarships from parents of kids who wanted to play and who couldn't come up with the $100 fee. This club is a very small, very hand to mouth operation, almost entirely volunteer operation, and that $100 fee goes largely for insurance, and what's left over goes to pay a trainer (that's what you call a soccer coach in the UK) who works with the kids, improves their skills, tactics, game sense, and espirit de corps. For this, the kid gets to practice about 15 or 20 times, gets to play around 10 games all over the western end of the state, and (hopefully) gets some help learning about teamwork, sportsmanship, hard work, fair play, and soccer skills. Furthermore, once you're on a soccer pitch it doesn't make any difference whether your mom drives a brand new Mercedes or a beat-up Chevy that's older than you are.
That's quite a bit for $100.
Thinking more about it, I remembered some kids who were new in our parish around the same time I was new. Although I didn't know it at the time (I found out a couple of years later), they had benefited from scholarships in the same soccer club, and two of them as a result had gotten scholarships at boarding schools. I had been at the time a little dubious/anxious about their home life, and I think that getting them into boarding school may possibly have been life-changing for both of them.
Although a contribution for soccer scholarships wasn't budgeted, we were able to scrape up on short notice enough to fund one kid with some left over for another, or to pay for a uniform. The club president -- who, by the way, had let me know previously that she was pretty skeptical about organized religion in all forms -- was very appreciative.
Then I thought about the Christmas presents we had collected in December and wondered just how life-changing any of them had the possibility of being. Although it's a lot more fun for the parishioners to go Christmas shopping for kids than to write checks for something as intangible as a soccer scholarship, I concluded that, all else being equal, the possible benefits of the soccer scholarships were greater than the Christmas presents.
And you know that the safety net doesn't even pretend to cover soccer scholarships.
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