Read the Local Paper: 40acts Day #5

Okay, I confess. I read the Huffington Post, the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail (all online) but don’t often take the time to really read the local paper. We get one on our doorstep once a week and I glance through it, but I don’t really sit down and read it. Besides (and I know this won’t make me popular to admit) I have a prejudice that the local paper is often filled with kitch and not the kind of news that a “serious person” would be concerned with (says the person who can’t pass up a headline about the latest celebrity gossip…serious news indeed!) Like so many other things, when it comes to reading the news, whether local or other, I tend to choose what interests me and leave the rest.

But this Lenten task really required me to sit down and read… and pray. This is a very different method to my usual “glance-and-discard” technique. Since we didn’t have a local paper on hand I went to the local paper online.

I wasn’t able to do it all in one sitting but a few sittings over the course of the day. This meant that over the course of the day I prayed for local schools, UOIT and Durham College, for the Humane Society, and an organization called Footprints. I prayed for teens who had been mugged and the teens who did the mugging; for a Good Samaritan who was treated with suspicion and the person who was suspicious; for local artists and a Canadian exchange student overseas. I gave thanks for students willing to “Get Swabbed” to help find matches for those waiting for bone marrow transplants and for police who stuffed themselves with purple pancakes to raise awareness for Epilepsy. I prayed over music groups and opinions and lives well lived and lives cut short. All of this in my own backyard. Through prayer (and the power of the Holy Spirit) I didn’t just read about the community, I became connected to it.

Maybe it should come as no surprise then that as I drove home from work, I felt a deepened sense of appreciation for the streets on which I traveled including the people and places on them. I was grateful for the person in that police car, and the teachers at that school, and the teenagers at that bus stop.

Something had changed: they were no longer out there…they were in here.

Maybe that explains why my heart felt so full.