Backyard Church

Thoughts on applying a 2000 year old religion to 21st Century life

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I Have a Friend Who’s a Mobster — He Also Plays Santa Claus

8 min readMar 17, 2025

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A guy at my job once told me, completely deadpan, that if I ever needed someone dealt with, he knew a guy who owed him a few favors.

And he was dead serious.

This is a man who grew up in the gangs — where justice wasn’t something you waited for, it was something you delivered. He’s seen things most of us only hear about in news reports and true crime podcasts. He’s been in fights that didn’t end until someone stopped moving. He knows what it means to survive in a world where mercy is weakness, and consequences don’t come from courts but from the bloke standing in front of you with a crowbar.

Now he drives a forklift.

And he’s also one of the kindest people I know.

He fosters troubled kids, the ones the system doesn’t know what to do with. The ones who punch walls and curse out teachers and have long since stopped expecting anything good from adults. He feeds them, listens to them, and makes sure they know they have a place to come home to.

He’s the kind of man who’d dress up as Santa Claus for a kids’ charity event and go all in — big laugh, extra presents, making sure every kid…

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Backyard Church
Backyard Church

Published in Backyard Church

Thoughts on applying a 2000 year old religion to 21st Century life

Dan Foster
Dan Foster

Written by Dan Foster

Writer, Poet, Blogger: Tackling life, faith, culture, religion, politics, and spirituality. Connect with me: https://linktr.ee/DanFosterWriter