We stopped in Marshall, Texas today where I met with Shane Johnson who has established a couple half way houses here for those in drug and alcohol recovery. Called: The Way, it’s a Christian based program that provides in-house meetings and eductional programs, connects residents with jobs in the community, and so on. What’s more, Trinity Episcopal Church here provides a free meal for the residents every week and a doctor at the Church, Dr. Lake Littlejohn, offers his services free to the residents. I told a reporter from Marshall’s newspaper that our campaign believes there should be more help to those in recovery, because with active addiction, domestic violence increases, crime increases, and a whole other constellation of social problems… We also met with Fr. Denzil Vithanage of St. Joseph’s Church here. He is from Sri Lanka, one of the countries most devastated by the recent tsunami. Fr. Denzil, who is an absolute spiritual dynamo, went into action right after he heard the waves had hit — and he has been able to raise $24,000 (so far) in this small Texas town to help the people in his country. Fr. Denzil worked with Mother Thersa before coming to America, and told me being “empathetic” to the plight of others means, not just giving, but psycholigically and physically entering into the sufferings of others. And the plight of those in crisis pregnancy is a top priority at St. Joseph’s here. Among a number of projects, they’ve started a Gabriel Project, which provides financial, emotional and spiritual help to those in crisis pregnancy. The combination of programs here have been so effective, St. Joseph’s was just named the top Pro-Life parish in the diocese.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We stopped in Marshall, Texas today where I met with Shane Johnson who has established a couple half way houses here for those in drug and alcohol recovery. Called: The Way, it’s a Christian based program that provides in-house meetings …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}