Kenneth

Since this Loved & Loving project is in effect, at least to some degree, I'm trying to practice what I preach. I don't claim to be the most Loving person on the face of the planet or at APU, in fact I'm among the most closed off at times. So I've been making an effort to do what I say. Here's what the goal of all this is:

To Love our community that is APU by acknowledging and reaching out to each other.

To Love our community that is the world. To reach the broken and Love all people. 

The means are this:

Say hello to people you see and be willing to talk to them and care about them....


It seems like a modest goal, a small thing. I wanted to share with all of the possibilities of just saying "Hi" to a stranger. I hope this isn't scary:


I was walking to my apartment when I saw a man walking towards me. He was in his late 30's, hispanic, nicely dressed, holding a beer. I said "Hi!" and he said "Are you studying Christian Theology?"

I said Hi, and we ended up talking for an hour right outside of Bowles. I won't get into the details of the conversation now, but tonight I made a friend. I think he needed an outlet to talk, and I think he needed to hear what I had to say, and that I needed to hear what he had to say. After an hour I prayed with him, gave him a hug, a handshake, and my email address. We showed Love to each other and we talked about how we could show Love to others.

Kenneth is a broken man, just like anyone else. He's in his late 30's/early 40's and he's been divorced. He definitely wasn't sober (which at times made conversation difficult). He's angry at a lot of things in the world, but we agreed on at LEAST one thing: Jesus is God, Jesus is our Savior, Jesus is Love. We both felt like the two things went hand in hand. 

Tonight I met Kenneth, we had a wonderful conversation. He's my friend and I Love him. I know that tonight, God brought Kenneth and I together and I wanted to share that with all of you. 


Say "Hi", it really does mean more than you think.

We're all broken and we all need Love...