Who are the people in your neighborhood?

I first heard about Anthony from my mother in law.  Anthony was a coworker of hers at a pharmacy, who had always said he was writing a book.  Many people talk about their dreams but Anthony’s dream came true despite the hurdles he had to overcome.  A big hurdle being that he taught himself to read and write and has been writing prayers in a notebook ever since.  Anthony has a childlike faith that adults could learn a lesson from.  Anthony is mentally challenged and a bit of a savant.  He can remember dates and even what the weather was like on that day.

After reading my mother in law’s copy of the book I knew I had to have a copy of my own and to meet him in person.  Getting a hold of a copy of the book was harder than I thought it would be.  Anthony ‘s book kept on selling out at all of the local businesses.  After a few attempts I finally got my prize.

My prayer to meet Anthony came true about a month ago when someone from the local newspaper set up a time for me to meet him at The Bitter End, a local coffee shop.  Anthony was all smiles and very welcoming.

He remembered my mother in law and her anniversary.  He made mention to her looking really young which she loved when I shared that with her later.

He has two other books he wants to publish.  One about being bullied and one about his time at a facility where he was abused.  The book shares a bit of his background in the facility.  He also shared of being bullied as a child and even remembered the date and time of the last painful incident May 23, 1978 at 3pm.

He shared of proving the doctors wrong who said he would be a vegetable.

I asked Anthony what he would want people to know about him.  He shared that he did it on his own, no school, homework , only Jesus helped him.  He wants everyone to know that God will always be with them.  In his book, are his simple, heartfelt prayers.  He writes in his journal everyday.

I also have to share that he has an amazing gift of creating art with LEGO bricks.  He shared that the legos are God’s patterns.  As I flipped through the pages of his book, I knew my boys would love to meet him because of their shared passion.

We purchased some lego’s for Anthony ‘s upcoming birthday and visited him about a month later at his home to deliver them.  He had shared at our first meeting that it would be fine to bring the boys by to see his work.  I also brought my mother in law as an insurance policy.  I knew he would remember her… and he did, along with the date of her anniversary.  Anthony welcomed us in and showed us some of his lego creations.

 

He has stacks of lego signs that he creates all over his home. He started creating them in the 1990’s.

 

He also has inventive items like a lego hand that moves and one of my boys favorite … a toilet with a lid that goes up and down.

On our way home in the car my boys were inspired to make new kinds of lego creations.  They began sharing of the new ideas that they wanted to try to create.  Anthony took the barrier off what they thought was possible.  Ironically, as children they didn’t notice anything different about Anthony.  They just saw a man who was a lego genius, who also had a cool book.  Maybe as adults we can learn from them not to be so quick to put labels on people and just accept them as they are.

While we were visiting Anthony, my husband was at an informational meeting to learn about how we could be involved and help acclimate the refugees who are coming to our city each month.  We didn’t realize how hard and lonely it can be for the many refugees who are put on a plane, not knowing the language, who have lost everything and everyone as they start over in a totally foreign culture.

Simple things like knowing how to turn on light switches in their apartment can be so foreign to someone who was living in a tent city on the other side of the world.  Two different refugees shared their heartbreaking stories. One of them had a traumatic story that began at the age of 9- the same age as my oldest son.  How naive and blessed we are to live in this country even with all of its flaws.

Below is the trailer for the documentary “God grew tired of us” that shows the difficult adjustment to several of the “lost boys” of Sudan , as young adults who came to America.

What struck me most about the documentary was how lonely the refugees are when they come to the United States.  They shared how they are surrounded by people and yet there is no sense of community.

Our  community alone received 600 refugees last year.

“Fewer than 1% of refugees are referred for resettlement in a foreign country. Of those that are resettled internationally, about 75,000 are brought to the US each year and assigned to local resettlement agencies.”

That’s 600 people each year in my city, who survived horrible turmoil in their home country and had to flee in order to survive. They need a friend and I never even gave much thought to what their traumatic experience would have been like before or the need they encounter while adapting to our culture.

At the meeting my husband learned that you can help by many different levels of involvement such as being a friend, giving rides to their job, medical appointments, helping them learn English, provide housing, and just being a community to call on in crises or time of need.

The Greatest command is to love our neighbor as ourselves. So who is our neighbor?

Maybe we could learn a lesson or two from loving our neighbors from the Mr. Rodgers theme song