by Pam Tinsley

Each Black Friday, instead of getting up at the crack of dawn to get the best Black Friday deal, our 12-year-old neighbor Lauren and her family get up early to prepare crockpots full of hot chocolate. While our consumption-driven culture pushes us to buy things we don’t need and spend money we don’t have, Lauren holds a Hot Chocolate Sale to raise money for an organization that’s important to her. Lauren has been doing this on the day after Thanksgiving for the past five years. It’s part of her and her family’s Thanksgiving tradition and a way for her to give back to her community.

This year Lauren is fundraising for the Low Income Housing Institute, an innovative Tiny House Shelter Program that provides warm, safe, secure shelter in tiny houses in community settings with case management that helps program participants find permanent housing and employment. Lauren says that she wants to support LIHI because “they provide places for people to live and support themselves while they get back on their feet. Also, because everyone deserves a safe, warm home, especially around the holidays.”

In a culture that has become increasingly self-centered, it’s both comforting and reassuring to see a new generation recognizing that they have a responsibility to their community. Community is where and how we share our values. Community is where and how we care for one another. Community binds us together.

When we as Christians profess to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind and to love our neighbors as ourselves, we profess that community – is vital. To follow Jesus means loving our neighbor in both word and action. And, as Jesus so often reminds us, the neighbor – the community – we’re called to love includes those whom we often overlook or prefer not to see. Community is where love and justice come together.

Lauren’s Hot Chocolate Sale shows us how simple, ordinary actions can lead to meaningful transformation of hearts and minds. Her fundraiser began as an act of thanksgiving for medical care that she’d received and has become an expression of who she is as a person – someone who teaches others that Gratitude Friday might just be more rewarding than Black Friday. She teaches us that gratitude is the soil in which joy thrives[1].

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[1] Signboard at Central Bible Church, Tacoma, WA.