I received one of those “cute” stories via forwarded email today. This time it was about a home owners association that was fed up with the food wrappers that blew into their neighborhood from “Mexicans” working at a nearby construction site. Frustrated, they came up with a plan. They formed a group called “Inner Neighborhood Services,” made themselves blue windbreakers and caps with the group’s initials (INS), armed themselves with cameras and clipboards, and went to “police” the trash. As the story goes, the workers saw them and most never came to work again.

The “moral” of the story is that the government is incompetent or unwilling to do anything about immigration (the story isn’t really about litter), so ordinary citizens need to apply their own ingenuity to get rid of them.

Snopes.com identifies this story as an Urban legend – not an actual occurrence. But how might it have worked if something like this happened in a Christian neighborhood?

Perhaps the Christians would have noticed that most of the workers were immigrants. Knowing that immigrants are sometimes easy to intimidate and take advantage of, their hearts would have gone out to them. “Those guys work hard all day. Their employers don’t even provide them a place to throw away their lunch wrappers. How about we pool our resources and start preparing a tasty and healthy lunch for them? That we can not only meet their need for food, but also help them make friends in the community. Who knows, maybe we’ll even learn something from them?”