Now here's a nice photo of fresh snow on the mountains and of cranberry fields deep in dormancy. A chilly late fall day when working steady keeps one warm and the pay cheques coming.

What one doesn't see in this photo is how that glorious day impacted those in our community not fortunate enough to rise from a warm bed, eat a healthy meal and head off to a good paying job that keeps a roof over one's head.

This evening in our community a small group of folks headed down to the area of town known as the ghetto and set up a couple of tables from which they served cabbage rolls and mac and cheese and buns and sandwiches to a band of hungry souls to whom cold crisp days mean long and sometimes deadly nights.

Here are men and women who stand about with the light snow blowing on them, eating what may be their only hot meal of the day. Here are a couple of kids with their dad who say please and thank you and who tonight will get to snuggle down with a full belly. Here are people who will slip the chocolate bar in their pocket and save it, perhaps for those lonely hours between three and six in the morning when the cold will not allow sleep and the sugar fix might help them get through until another dawn.

Life on the street.

If Jesus came back to earth tonight I know that he would be standing behind a table on some lonely street corner ladling hot food onto paper plates and passing the time with folks for whom an after dinner smoke is so much more than a middle class addiction.

I'm thinking that the if in the above paragraph is a word that I wrote without looking in my heart.

Tonight, in a poor section of our small town, I saw Jesus alive in the hearts of those who came to help and of those who accepted that help. He didn't go away two thousand years ago. He was there then; he is here today.