My New Family: A Family of Choice

RunningWorks Team pre Thunder Road Marathon with 5 full marathoners and 6 half marathoners

Time after time, I have written about the important role my family plays in my life. The stability I’ve always found at home has been the initial driving force for my success and happiness as a person and an athlete. That is why I am so excited to share this passion with a new family, a family I feel very much a vital part of now and who I would miss terribly on any given day just like I do my own. Now, don’t get too worried that I am abandoning my family of origin! I have simply found a purpose greater than myself with RunningWorks in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I am really looking forward to spending my first Thanksgiving with these special individuals.

For those of you who are not privy to who my RunningWorks family is, most of our men, women and children aged four to 60 years are homeless, jobless, severely impoverished or suffering from abuse, abandonment or neglect of some kind. The very fact that they choose to spend their time with us is a gift: a gift of time and trust that we will mentor them in their path to better lives. Trust is not something to be taken with a grain of salt with this population, and I am honored to among the few who get to spend time with all of them on a daily basis, let alone the upcoming Thanksgiving Holiday.

At RunningWorks, we speak often during our life skill sessions about “family of choice” since many of our men, women and children have been forsaken by those many of us hold most dear. Thanksgiving is a time I have spent in reverie with my own family grateful for what an incredible gift God has given me. Take for one moment and imagine a life on the streets, in a shelter, severely disadvantaged—or all of the above and completely estranged from your family on a day celebrated for kinship. For some, it causes depression and loneliness.

Since its inception three years ago, RunningWorks has offered a solution to the solitude of Thanksgiving for its team members with several options, which are open to everyone on the team at all its programs. I am so excited to be a part of the fourth annual Thanksgiving activities with my new family of choice. This Thursday, we have been invited to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s (UNCC) Center City campus for a homemade feast prepared by its faculty and staff for all Community Works programs from the Urban Ministry Center where our program was founded. This includes homeless men and women from RunningWorks, StreetSoccer945, as well as art, choir and gardening. From what I have heard, it is quite magical and even includes a choir, which I will love! Charlotte never ceases to amaze me with their effort to make the homeless feel “a part of” the city rather than outcasts despite what you may read.

Thanksgiving 2014 at RW's Program Director Laura Foust's soup kitchen

On Thanksgiving Day, we will have a feast at our RW Program Director Laura Foust’s regular weekly soup kitchen, where she is the chef every Thursday at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. They make our team feel special each year with a huge table set for 40-plus, flowers and blue-and-white napkins, etc. (our RW colors). To give a frame of reference, Chuck, a RW regular and team member since April 2012 who recently moved to D.C. for the winter since he is not “shelter eligible” here in Charlotte, made the trek home to us so he could run the Thunder Road Marathon with eleven RunningWorks teammates this past weekend and stay to spend Thanksgiving with his “family”. Those were his priorities and he was dead set on getting here.

Chuck at "The Wall", mile 20 Thunder Road Marathon

It really made an impression. Not only did it blow me away that Chuck completed his second marathon in two consecutive years yesterday (after having run the half marathon in 2013!), but also that he is one of the key organizers of our festivities in the coming weeks. He wants it to be special. He is intent on everyone being there and cared for and loved. Upon meeting Chuck last year, I never would have thought him to be the sentimental type. He has been on the street for eight years and is kind of a loner; yet, there is a spring in his step right now making me the most grateful I have been in a long time. I am more assured than ever that running works.

Happy Thanksgiving from our Family to Yours!

#RWTeam post marathon exhausted but still loving each other in Romare Bearden Park