Excerpted from Margaret Renkl's essay on Sept. 16, 2024, in The New York Times: 

Sometimes I don’t know how to keep believing in the possibility of justice — true justice, I mean, not the parody of justice the current Supreme Court keeps dishing out — when problems like gun violence and homelessness and the climate emergency, among so many other deep, systemic injustices, seem utterly intractable. How does a person maintain enough hope to believe that change is possible when nothing ever seems to change?

In my lowest moments, I look to the people who have devoted their lives to pursuing change anyway. I look to the gun-sense advocates pressing for laws that will keep children safe in schools, to the believers who pray outside prisons on execution days, to all the conservation organizations fighting to hold governments accountable for protecting the earth. Most of all, I look to Charlie Strobel, who died last year after giving his life to God and to the unhoused.

In her foreword to “The Kingdom of the Poor,” a memoir by Father Strobel that will be published Tuesday by Vanderbilt University Press, Ann Patchett recalls that her friend’s ordination card was printed with the words of Robert Kennedy: “Few of us have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”

That’s just what Father Strobel did. Over the years, he managed to bring his congregation, and then his diocese, and then his whole city to an understanding of what we owe to our unhoused neighbors. Last month, Nashville opened its first permanent housing development for the homeless. In addition to furnished studio apartments, it offers addiction treatment, mental health support and job counseling. The facility is named Strobel House.

When I feel helpless at the thought of all the seemingly unsolvable problems our species faces, I remind myself of the political vicissitudes Father Strobel weathered in his quiet quest for justice over more than five decades of service. Mayors came and went, governors came and went, Tennessee shifted from solid blue to a sea of red, but Charlie Strobel never wavered. Cot by cot and peanut butter sandwich by peanut butter sandwich, he fed his homeless neighbors and gave them a safe place to sleep. And he taught us to do the same.

I thought of Father Strobel again last week when I saw that blue jay’s feather in the grass. Birds lose their old feathers at the end of summer, but even as the old feathers drop, new ones are already growing.

Those birds feel awful, as I sometimes do, as we all sometimes do. But a change is coming — for them and perhaps for us. Even when the prospect of transformation seems very far from certain, I remind myself to keep faith with that possibility, to work toward making it a reality: A change is coming. Surely, someday, a change is coming.

Read the full essay here.