The End of Week 1-Perseverance

My First Week…
Officially, I love this work! I think if the rest of my time was like this first week- this experience will be all that I had hoped for. I find the work very challenging, fluid, and life giving. Three of the five work days I got up at 4:00 am (I was very impressed with myself). My days were made up of getting picked up by the workers, checking out work sites to see if other companies were still hiring the company that the workers were striking from. There are a couple sites that have contracted with the company. After checking the work sites, we went out and did some hand billing. Hand billing is handing out papers that reveal that companies are still hiring this company that the abuses their workers. (The police were called on Tuesday, and I was chosen to speak to them.) Delegations followed for the rest of the morning, and three evenings found me attending meetings with another supervisor who is dealing mostly with the religious communities and other community organizations.
Another highlight was on Thursday we went to a rally at the city offices to protest the blatant waste of money that the Sheriff of Maricopa County was able to justify. Currently, he is the only Sherriff in the United States to not carry a firearm because he has a law suite against him (he has been sued concurrently for the last 10 years).
I am reading a book-Of Human Hands: The Christian at Work in the World, A Reader in the Spirituality of Work. Jeff Behrens writes on page 33,
God would have enjoyed every tale of woe and promise and found something of himself in each person there. Their lives were such a potpourri of goodness and wisdom, tempered b the brute numbness of factory labor and the unfairness of the way things are when the lack of power and money afflict human life. There was something sacramental to it all.
I found this section to be so profound. There is a goodness in the struggle that these workers are undertaking. Granted the workers have been facing this struggle for the last 3 years, but the perseverance in which they continue their stand for justice is based out of a loyalty for their friends and family who still work for this company. The workers are fighting and remaining in this struggle for the common good. That is the innate goodness that is present in their lives.