Chuck Cardwell had an entirely different vision of his volunteer job driving a van load of St. Elmo neighborhood children to services weekly at Lookout Mountain United Methodist Church.
"We are not singing 'Jesus Loves the Little Children' all the way up the mountain," he wrote in an email. "I had ... [envisioned] this Norman Rockwell picture with bubbles flowing behind as we winded our way up the hill, each child asking me about Jesus and his love for them."
Instead, he said, the children -- white, black and Hispanic -- climb aboard hungry, tired, in various stages of dress and, in general, missing love.
Cardwell, 41, is not unfamiliar with poverty or with youngsters having less of something than they should. He had taught some of the same kids in Sunday school, sat with them in church and had made mission trips to Nicaragua.
Now, though, he is getting them before they've had a chance to wipe the deprivation off their faces and put on their church smiles.
"Instead," Cardwell wrote, the ride "feels like we are pulling a U-Haul up the mountain behind the van, and it is full of the luggage our kids carry. Sometimes the trailer has no wheels, and we have to drag it up, and sometimes I can feel God helping push from behind."
The van ride up the mountain is necessary each week because his church, St. Elmo United Methodist, is being rebuilt after a fire in 2009. The congregation is meeting at Lookout Mountain UMC until the rebuilding is complete.
Cardwell wrote not because he minds driving the van and not because he's tired of seeing the need on the faces of children but because he feels a bit helpless.
"We have them for so little time -- about two hours a week," he said.
It is, he acknowledged, a bit like digging a well with a spoon.
"I learn more [in]
every trip from our children," Cardwell said. "In my few months as a driver in our van program, I have seen hunger, loneliness, vehicles riddled with bullet holes, anger, depression, drug deals close to our children's homes."
Some of the issues, he said, can be dealt with. He can provide oranges for breakfast. He can suggest counting squirrels to pass the time as the van climbs Ochs Highway. He can ask about positive things going on in school. He can be present when a child's anger has reached its boiling point. He even can pray the men on a particular corner go away so the children have a safer neighborhood.
I wondered if he'd thought about what would happen if St. Elmo UMC wasn't there, if thousands of churches weren't there for children in similar situations around the world.
It would be, we agreed, a much darker place.
That is why, when I hear of the growing numbers of the unchurched, when I hear people calling church members hypocritical, when I hear Christians mocked, I nevertheless can be certain of how much good is being done by the Chuck Cardwells and the St. Elmo UMCs of the world.
All in the name of a little baby whose birth is celebrated this season.
When the church on St. Elmo Avenue is completed again, its facilities will be even better equipped to serve the children of the neighborhood. Its clothes closet and food pantry will return. A gymnasium will be there where none was before.
"I pray that God continues to place these children in our lives," Cardwell said. "Just maybe, he disrupts our lives with them so that we might see what is really important. I pray for us all [because the world] is a tough yet loving place to be."