By Father Timothy Gollob
Special to The Texas Catholic
This morning a remarkable event took place…it was rain, rain, rain, rain in Texas and in August!
I was anxious to get out to the garden to inspect my homemade rain gauge which was calibrated to go up to 10 inches of moisture. It was too rainy to go there, even with my knee boots, so I telephoned my fishing buddy in Bristol to find out how much rain had soaked into his ranch. He informed me that he had just dumped 5 inches of water out of his gauge on the fence post and that it was still raining fiercely! He was delighted that the stock tanks were filling up and we made plans to go fishing whenever the soggy fields became passable again for his versatile John Deer vehicle.
In the meantime, I was checking out various items with my Google assistant with a few SOS questions. She was prompt and helpful in letting me know about the song of the tree frogs which were chirping in the front yard as the rain poured down.
Someone mentioned hobos. My assistant immediately informed me that in the Depression Days (not in this century!) over 3,000,000 men were out of work and they were the hobos who roamed the nation on the railroads as uninvited guests. As they jumped off at various towns they would go down the streets and look for chalk or charcoal symbols which told them who would give a sandwich and who would have mean dogs and who would turn them in as vagrants and who would feed them after they listened to a lecture on religion, etc. etc.
How similar is this story to the news every morning when we read about so many refugees who are travelling up from Central America to look for employment in the United States! They, too, have to ride the railroads. They, too, have to find a friendly welcome. They, too, are considered vagrants and get turned away, sometimes over and over again.
Jesus said: “I was a stranger, and you took me in.”
Father Timothy Gollob is a retired priest of the Diocese of Dallas.