How did we get to this point?

A lot of people ask us why we are spending the first 10 months of our retirement working in a soup kitchen in Philadelphia, and how we selected the St. Francis Inn. The answer to the first question is easy. We believe as Catholic Christians that God loves the poor, and asks us to take care of the poor. This task translates to different things for different people. For a number of years we have been talking about taking a year to serve the needy somewhere in the U.S. Family considerations caused us to limit our search to the eastern United States.

We began researching places to work about 2 years ago. At first we just stuck ideas into a file. However, last summer we go serious. I used the Catholic Network of Volunteer Service website

(http://www.cnvs.org/volunteerprograms/workshops.php) to search for organizations that would take married couples over the age of 55 that had housing and that were located east of the Mississippi. We came up with a list of 28 organizations. I made a spreadsheet with all the information I could get about the group, the jobs for volunteers, the locations, the dates to apply, etc. Both of us got a copy, and then we spent a week thinking about the groups and praying that God would show us the places He would want us to go to. We ranked our choices 1-5, then got back together. We were sort of surprised (but not shocked) to see that we had chosen 4 of the same organizations. That's what happens when you've been married 34 years! So then we started to contact the groups. One of the groups was going to stop placements in a year, another only had housing for couples in California and another didn't want to hear from us until January. So we narrowed it down to two groups and visited them both in October and November,2008. Both were great organizations and both had a lot of positives and some negatives. However, we really were attracted to the community at the St. Francis Inn, their mission to serve the poor with dignity, the Franciscan charism of hospitality, and the opportunity to be challenged in our thinking about the poor and homeless. We see these next 10 months as a life-changing experience, mentally and spiritually.