For Wilshire Baptist Church
On Sunday morning we celebrated the great accomplishment of Blake Perry, who for his Eagle Scout project organized an effort to collect and distribute thousands of pieces of clothing and personal hygiene items for refugee children at the border who are being detained while their status is being determined. As has been said from the Wilshire pulpit and elsewhere, we can disagree about how people came here and who can stay, but everyone should be able to eat, be clothed and be healthy – especially the children. So, well done, Blake! Your project was timely, well planned and wonderfully carried out.
At the risk of sounding like I’m riding on Blake’s coattails — or his Eagle tailfeathers — my Eagle Scout project focused on immigrants, too. In the 1970s, refugees were coming to the United States from war-torn Southeast Asia, and our church sponsored a family from Vietnam. Church members provided a house, food, clothing, a job for the father. My parents gave the family an old car and had them over for their first Christmas Eve dinner. Their arrival coincided with my Eagle Scout requirements, and I jumped in with a project to tutor the three elementary age students. Scouting has a strong emphasis on citizenship, after all, and so what better way to help prepare new U.S. citizens than to get them up to speed on reading and writing in English. So, we worked on that, and I threw in some simple math, which included recognizing and counting U.S. coins and cash.
Scouting is not the church, but there definitely are Christian values woven into Scouting’s founding principles. And I contend there is some serious “Kingdom work” in projects such as Blake’s that help meet the most basic needs of refugees and immigrants. There also is some similarity in Blake’s project and some of our church mission projects in that the magnitude of the impact may never be known to us. In my case, I helped three kids for a brief period. One died tragically while still a child, but the other two grew up, went to college, earned advanced degrees and have had meaningful lives and careers. I don’t claim that success for myself; I was just one strand in a larger fabric of support that helped with their transition to a new home. Blake’s project will help thousands of people in ways he will never fully know. But years from now, someone may recall how they came to this country as a child and were given fresh clothing and shoes, soap and a toothbrush, and they’ll remember how it made them feel welcomed and worthy.
Scouting has been through a lot of turmoil in recent years, as has the church, much of it due to bad behavior by leadership — the “grownups” who are supposed to know better and be better. They’ve damaged lives, sullied the brand and threatened the mission, but the whole of the church and of Scouting is bigger and better than those flawed individuals. Young men like Blake help shore up my belief that Scouting is still a force for good in our world. And the participation and support of communities like Wilshire in Blake’s project brings assurance that the good work of the church is far from over.
In our hymnal there is a song, “On Eagle’s Wings,” based on scriptures from Psalms, Exodus and Matthew. This is the refrain:
And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun,
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.
It’s a hymn about the protective grace of God, but you’ll notice in the words that God doesn’t work alone. God gets some help from the eagles. That’s Blake, and that’s you and me.