The "Y"

My wife and I used to work out at the local “Y”.  Where we live we see Y buildings everywhere.

Our little church is like a floating crap game.  You have to know someone on the inside to know where we are meeting this week.  The first two Sunday mornings of each month we meet in a public elementary school gymnasium. Our announcer that morning read a thank you note for the school supplies we had donated to the school several weeks previous.  During the week, the same gym space doubles as a morning and afternoon program run by (you guessed it) the Y.

On one wall of the gym the Y has posted 12 behavior rules.  After our worship time this morning which focused on the harvest (it is October after all), I walked over to the wall to check it out.  Everyone else was visiting and catching up on the week’s activities, but as a flaming introvert, I decided to go read the wall.

To my surprise, the twelve rules were mostly Bible based.  The first one spoke of loving each other.  Another said “treat others the way you want to be treated.”  No references were given, but to even a casual Bible student the source was evident.

Beyond my surprise, I was inspired to be hopeful about our school system.  Here in a public school in Minnesota, a state that a few years ago sent the most liberal of the 50 senators to Washington, the Y was teaching kids to live the way that Jesus had encouraged all of us to live.

Perhaps this should not have come as a surprise to me, but because so much is changing, I thought the Y had probably changed as well.  While the organization is widely known as the Y, it is officially the YMCA which stands for Young Men’s Christian Association.  It is no longer gender specific (a good thing), but it apparently retained its Christian values.