Luke 24, 50 through 53, and he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands

he blessed them.

While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven, and they worshipped

him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple

blessing God.

This is the Word of the Lord.

At 22, I moved to New York City to start a youth ministry serving in poversed immigrant

families.

In those early days, I befriended a teacher who was an extraordinary man with a heart to

know and to love the students and their families that were within his classroom.

He invited me into those friendships and relationships that he had cultivated.

So youth work for me looked a whole lot like attending family barbecues and visiting

bodegas with food stamps in hand and sitting in apartments with two to three bedrooms

had eight to ten family members living in them.

Sometimes mediating family disputes, which had a 12-year-old being used as a language

translator between me and those in the dispute, it was pure chaos.

And it was wild and beautiful in the way I imagine that Jesus escapades probably were.

In a couple of years in, we're meeting on Wednesday nights in a church basement that had

somehow this little ministry had grown into the largest youth ministry on the island of

Manhattan, which sounds so much more impressive than it was.

Most is everything here.

But all of that, every bit of it, was built on the relational generosity of this one teacher

...