When I found out I was doing night strike, I honestly had no idea what it was. At this time, I was nine or ten years old. My mom had signed me up, along with a friend and my sister, and it was planned through my church to have it held under the Hawthorne Bridge. Night Strike is an event that usually happens through your church, and you go downtown to serve the homeless, whether that is serving food, playing games with them, or giving them their basic needs. That sounds great, right, but being the age I was, I was terrified. 

The number one reason that I was so anxious, was because of the things that people were telling me, mainly my mom. 

“Just be careful of anyone who looks unsafe,” my mom told me, “and if your safety is ever in danger, there are always the police there to help.”

“I just don’t even want to get in any situations like that,” I replied.

“I know, but just in case something happens,” she said,  “you can go to any trusted adult.”

If she told me that now, I would totally take that as positive information, but it made me so nervous thinking about all the problems I could run into. The second problem I had, was my shyness. Back in elementary school, I was even more shy than I am now, so doing a big event where you had to be kind of be a social person, well I’m just going to say that wasn’t what I loved doing. Despite all the anxiety I had gone through, I went. 

When I got there, everything was being set up, and so it was pretty cool for me to see the whole production. There were so many things going on: people setting up tables, cooking food, preparing food, setting up places for pets that the homeless would have, and much more. By this point in the process, I had calmed down a lot. I still was a bit nervous, but my sister had helped me settle down.

“It’s okay,” she told me. “you have half of church staff here, many of them you know. You can go to any of them if you want them to help or guide you in any sort of way at any point in time.”

I still don’t know why what my sister said had helped and my mom’s words didn’t, but from there on, I was a lot better than before. 

Throughout the night I had done many things, including serving food, playing a huge variety of very many games, talking to the homeless, doing random jobs, and just having fun. Much of the things that I was doing made me realize how lucky I am to be able to live with people that care about me, and that love me. How lucky I am to have the basic needs every day. How lucky I am to have the amazing opportunities that I get to experience everyday, and the ones like night strike. The homeless people that I talked to said that this was their favorite event of the year, and that they look forward to this every single year. I found that very interesting. They said they loved it because they felt like it gave them a family and they felt like they were safe for once. I ended up getting several good lessons out of this event, and that is to think of others instead of just myself, to look at myself in the bigger picture of things, and to be aware of what others are going through.