A Postcard From Louisville

America’s most famous boxer, Muhammad Ali, first got into the sport because of the frustration over having his new red bike stolen off the porch of his childhood home.

He channeled his anger into something amazing.

Today, the West Louisville Kentucky neighborhood where Ali grew up doesn’t seem to have changed much from the rough area that produced him.

Last week, I had the pleasure of accompanying five other adults and 14 teens from the Hostyn and Plum churches as we did service work through a program called Catholic Heart Work Camp at several West Louisville homes just blocks from Ali’s boyhood home.

Hundreds of teens from around the country actually came to La Grange several years ago to work on homes damaged by Hurricane Harvey as part of a Catholic Heart Work Camp.

We’ve been trying to return the favor ever since.

Part of the point of these types of trips is to expose all of us to people and places outside of the world we see everyday.

And these were certainly Louisville neighborhoods unlike our own. None of the residents looked like us.

We worked at one house where the home owner was an elderly black Muslim gentleman who had fought in the Korean War.

When we walked up to his house, we all noticed the handgun that was sitting on the table next to him on the porch. We invited him to join us in the morning prayer we said every morning before we started work. He said he would love to. “Let me put this away first,” he said, grabbing the gun and placing it in the house before rejoining us.

We worked at one house where there was a revolving door of residents/visitors – and we weren’t ever sure who would answer the door. Amidst three days of scraping, and painting and clearing brush at that place, there was only one person at that house we really connected with. He was a dog lover, and he let the kids wash his pair of pit bulls.

One day, on our way over to the house, we stopped at a Dollar General store to buy a couple of new stuffed toys for the dogs - who had ripped up their old stuffed animals to shreds playing tug-of-war with the kids the day before. On our way out of the store an elderly black woman stopped us.

“What are y’all doing here?” she curiously, but nicely asked of our little group and the only reason I can think of for her question was that we looked so different from everyone else in the area.

After a long week of work we were able to appreciate some of Louisville’s other areas – the Louisville Slugger bat factory, the site on the Ohio River where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark met up in 1803 to begin their combined journey west, and a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.

But I think, for everyone in our group, last week was a challenging week in a lot of ways – from early morning wakeups to restless nights on air mattresses, sleeping in classrooms of a middle school – along with dozens of other church groups from around the country. The biggest souvenir my son brought home was a bad case of poison ivy from clearing brush.

But adversity, when used well, can be a very good thing - like Ali’s Red Bike Moment.

The Ali Center in Louisville says of a Red Bike Moment: “Most of us can reflect on our own personal history and identify a transformational event in our lives that occurred because of a challenge or some type of adversity.”

May we all find the positives in our challenges today.