Serving our neighbors with dignity
Encounter at Catholic Charities
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In high school, I volunteered at the Good Shepherd Food Pantry in Linn, Missouri, to earn service hours for the A+ Scholarship Program.
What began as a requirement quickly became something more meaningful.
The pantry gave me an opportunity to give back to my community, but it also changed the way I understood the people around me.
Among those I served were students I went to school with.
That experience taught me early on that we rarely know the full circumstances another person is carrying.
Someone we see at school, at Mass, at the grocery store or in our own neighborhood may be facing challenges we know nothing about.
Those circumstances, however, do not change who that person is or the dignity they possess.
Today, as Communications Specialist at Catholic Charities of Central and Northern Missouri, I often encounter only a small piece of someone’s story.
Behind every statistic, photograph or success we share is a person whose life is much bigger than the glimpse we see.
That is why the way we tell someone’s story matters.
The stories we tell influence how we see our neighbors, and how we see people influences how we treat them.
Our Catholic faith teaches us that every person possesses inherent dignity because each of us is created in the image and likeness of God.
Every person we encounter has a name, a history and a story.
Those stories may be very different from our own, but the dignity at the heart of them is the same.
This October, the Catholic Church observes Respect Life Month, and this year’s theme, “Mary, Mother of Life,” invites us to look to Mary’s example and recognize the God-given dignity of human life in every stage and circumstance.
That call extends into the everyday encounters we have with one another.
Last month offered several reminders of that.
We observed World Suicide Prevention Day, celebrated the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, and began Hispanic Heritage Month.
Each invited us in a different way to consider human life, suffering, culture, faith and the importance of accompanying one another.
On Sept. 15, Catholic Charities hosted “An Evening of Welcome: Prayer & Conversation.”
During the evening, panelists spoke about immigration experiences and the importance of making people feel welcome during some of the most difficult moments of their lives.
One panelist shared his own experience pursuing lawful permanent residence through his marriage to a U.S. citizen.
Believing he was arriving for an appointment related to that process, he was instead detained and deported to Honduras, separated from his wife and child.
After many months, working and sending money back home to support his family in the U.S., he received his green card and returned home to his loved ones.
Hearing his story offered something that a label or statistic cannot: a glimpse of the person behind it.
At Catholic Charities, we encounter neighbors at many different stages of life and under many different circumstances.
Through Community Services, Family Immigration Services, and Parish Social Ministry, we walk alongside people experiencing food insecurity, financial hardship, immigration challenges and other moments of uncertainty.
The needs may be different, but our approach begins in the same place: with the person.
We are called to look beyond an immediate circumstance and recognize the neighbor standing before us.
Their experiences may have shaped their lives, but no person can be reduced to the challenge they are facing.
Jesus tells us in Matthew’s Gospel, “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12).
Living that command can begin with something as simple as allowing another person to be more than our first impression of them.
My experience volunteering at a food pantry first taught me that lesson.
My work at Catholic Charities continues to reinforce it.
As a communicator, I have the responsibility to tell our neighbors’ stories with care, remembering that no photograph, paragraph or statistic can capture the entirety of a human life.
The same responsibility belongs to each of us in the stories we tell about the people we encounter.
We may never know the full story of the person beside us.
But we can resist reducing someone to a label, a mistake or a difficult circumstance.
We can listen before assuming, make room for another person’s story, and choose to recognize the image of God in the person before us.
That is one way we build a culture that respects life: not only by affirming human dignity, but by allowing that belief to shape how we speak, serve and encounter one another.
At Catholic Charities, volunteers and donors help make this mission possible every day.
If you would like to join us in serving our neighbors with dignity, we invite you to volunteer, make a gift or learn more about our work at cccnmo.diojeffcity.org.
