the big snow

So, we finally got dumped on. And the city got their plows out to deal with the residential streets for the first time this season. One of my friends called me up and said, “Wow, isn’t this terrible! We’re all snowed in.”
“Actually, I love it!” I responded. Everyone in the neighborhood emerges from their hibernation at the same time to shovel snow. It’s fantastic! It’s like a big party. Neighbors who you’ve never seen suddenly appear—all of them. The Hispanic lady, the redneck who beats his girlfriend, the Italian, the gay couple and the Hmong family with 10 children and I—we all emerge and nod knowingly at each other as we lean on our shovels to relieve our aching backs.

all the way to Calgary

So I’ve been out of the country for a stint. I went on a spiritual retreat in Calgary, Alberta. And I drove. Mapquest said it would take 23 hours. I left at 9 pm one evening and got there at 9 pm the next evening. And I took a 2 hour nap in North Dakota and another longer nap before crossing the Minnesota border.

I took an audio book along and was reminded of why I don’t read fiction—Not many fictional stories impress me or have ever impressed me. Other than that, I sang along to my CDs, prayed and talked to myself to pass the time and on the way home I prepared a speech, practiced it and drove directly to the meeting I was to give it at, upon entering town.

The retreat was amazing! The most holistic approach to personal transformation I have ever encountered. The teaching was quality stuff, presented by ordinary folks. Time was provided for personal reflection and then also “counseling” which was a mixture of the deepest prayer I’ve ever experienced in addition to dialoguing with two other counselors who had been assigned to me.

The Canadian Rockies.

The barren plain between Portal, ND and Calgary.

Yes. I drove for hours and hours on end.

a redemptive story

Losing Teagan: A story of tragedy, forgiveness and hope. http://www.bethel.edu/alumni/Focus/Spring/03/teagan.html

the fall of the Beachy

Once I apologized to a friend for being too tired to catch his “laugh here” cues. He looked at me kind of odd like and said, “Why don’t you just laugh about the things you find funny.” I told him because then I would never laugh and that would be a tragedy because I love to laugh. But there is a new post of the Beachy Satire site entitled The Fall of Man—Beachy Style that is gutt-wrenchingly funny--to me of course. Here it is http://beachycomplex.blogspot.com/

kingdom action renovare

The sermon I would have given...

Over the years, our neighborhoods and churches have become less and less cohesive. Activity, affiliations, media and progress have usurped tangible community. We have become isolated. We don’t know our literal neighbors much less our spiritual neighbors.

This is not in keeping with the first and greatest commandment—to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and to love your neighbor as yourself.

We need to know our neighbors. We need to love them every day. They are in the check-out lines and behind the desk at the businesses we frequent. We need to know what they like, what they eat, what they drink. We need to know if they are remodeling their bathroom or kitchen—then we need to go and help them, with the expectation of becoming their family to them (not a boyfriend or a girlfriend—cummon, giggle with me, those of you who know the inside joke). We need to know if they have addictions and then we need to love them anyway. We need to know if they are sex offenders or prostitutes and then we need to love them and be their brother or sister in Christ anyway. We need to know if their children need mentoring or some odd jobs to do.

And the best way to find out about these things in the lives of your neighbors—those who God has entrusted to you—is to have a cup of tea with them. You need to know how to be friendly and how to care about people. This is basic and very simple.

Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to get to the point where you can include your neighbor into your family. Sometimes it takes years. And meetings and prayer walks are only a small but vital piece in what it takes mobilize the kingdom of God in a neighborhood.

The church would like to help you organize whatever it is you need for your particular neighborhood. But these two things we are starting with is (1) To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind and then (2) to love your neighbor as yourself. And if you are already have a grasp on these two items in your life and if your friends and neighborhood is being transformed around you—You are a leader in the kingdom of God and need to be taking us to the next level of kingdom building infiltration in the world.

neighborhood action renovare: i.e. my first sermon

I’ve lived in my neighborhood for about 5 years now—just a little nitch on the East side. And as I started meeting my neighbors, I’ve learned how our neighborhoods have become less and less cohesive. Crime has gone up as population density increases and neighborhoods have become more transient. Those of you who have been here a long time have seen some of that fluctuation.
Yet we as a community of people need to combat those negative forces out there. We need to know our neighbors. We need to smile and say hi every day. We need to know who owns the property next door. We need to know if they are refinishing their kitchen or their bathroom.
And the best way to find that out is to have a cup of tea with them.

It’s basic and very simple. But this is how you find out if there’s somebody in the neighborhood that shouldn’t be there. It’s so that you know whether or not the truck that just pulled up next door—with the guys walking in and out with copper pipe—whether they are doing repairs or stripping the house for copper scrap. It’s how you report delinquent behavior of youth and children to their parents. It’s how you find support in your own time of need. It’s how you find out about the unpublicized sex offenders. It’s how I found out about the unpublicized sex offender who lived next door—through an open window. Later, his face was on the front page of the newspaper.

Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to get to the point where you can call your neighbor your friend. Sometimes it takes years. And block clubs and walking groups are only a small but vital piece in what it takes to be a unified community. We need to be in a block club before a problem happens but sometimes the problem becomes the catalyst.

NAC would like to help you organize whatever it is you need for your particular neighborhood. But the two things we are starting with is: (1) Registering block clubs and helping residents who don’t have block clubs form them. (2) learning how to put pressure on the city inspectors who enforce code violations for the nuisance property next door or the police calls it gets. And if you are already up to speed with both these items in your neighborhood—You are a community leader and need to be taking us to the next level of community building, networking and crime prevention.

neighborhood action

There’s been a series of violent crimes in my neighborhood which have stirred up the people. In response, our district council has held public meetings for concerned neighbors, phone-banks and other organized response outreaches. Since I chair the standing committee on neighborhood action, I’ve had to wrestle with how to respond the fear, channeling its energy into a positive force for change. A few weeks ago I leveled a challenge to the common citizen along with a fellow chair of the other standing committee on my board. There he is pictured, mildly scolding folks for not being involved in community building functions. He’s our resident lawyer, which makes taking an opposing position into a battle of the wits and the words—I love it! You should come see the show. Then we all go out afterward and the losers cry into their beers. I’ll post the religiously neutral sermon that I gave to the concerned citizen, from the pulpit of a church, with pipe organ accompaniment.

For those of you who like talk radio, and live in the TC area, this guy is on Sunday afternoons, on 1500 AM.

choosing redemptive resistance

It is difficult to be a pacifist. I used to give talks on non-violent resistance in my friend’s ethics class. It was his particular perspective as well, however, I could be more expressive as the guest speaker than he could be as the professor in a Baptist Seminary. I prefer to call pacifism redemptive resistance which is dubbed passive by the culture of violence. Yet it is everything but passive. One thing I always brought up is that non-violence or redemptive resistance is a lifestyle, not just a stance on war.

It applies to every situation I encounter. For me, choosing redemptive resistance is difficult, because I am a fighter. I do like to assert myself and win. And I can and have “won,” in a worldly sense. There have been a handful of times when I have been "violent". In the worst of those incidents, I aggressively confronted the stranger who stole money from my overly generous and helpful sisters. I got what I demanded from him but only after we bounced off each others’ chests and exchanged some very aggressive verbage. It was likely a stupid thing for a short girl to do. Neither of us got all we wanted and nothing was ever redemptive. I have one enemy in the world because of that incident, which is one too many. I felt the power of this worldly sort of “winning,” as I saw the beads of sweat explode from the dude’s brow. But I didn’t win.

Winning is instead, knowing one has all the power to conquer the other in a situation of conflict of interest yet laying that aside—choosing instead the path of redemptive self-sacrifice and brotherhood. It is a silent power. One takes all the energy of emotion from the sense of wrong and injustice inflicted by the other and turns it inward toward the carnal self that wants to win—crucifying it alongside the image of Christ who had all the power in the world to climb off the cross and bring justice to his persecutors—yet Christ and I wait for ultimate justice and redemption, which will come later, after the body of flesh is sacrificed. Ultimate power resurrects on the third day. Ultimate justice emerges from a source outside of one’s self. Both this justice and this power redeem the perpetrator and its victim in the loving embrace of vibrant life. They again join hands and walk down the road together.

Perhaps I’ll share a story or two later, if anyone is interested.

how I got tangled up in loving the unlovable

Moving into a neighborhood for the sole purpose of transforming it through altruistic love is a habit wired into me from my Mennonite upbringing. For me, nothing is an obstacle if relentless love is a part of the equation. In my district work, I run into folks who vie for change through lawmaking, policing and education. This method improves some things. However, it often persists as dirt pushing—pushing problems around instead of resolving them or transforming the problem into an asset or redemptive act.

Hence, the following is a bit of a synopsis of the beauty, the adventure and the struggle of altruistic investment into whatever and whomever decided to become my neighbor—transforming the neat rows of dwellings into a dynamic, supportive community. After all it takes a tribe to raise the children that run through the streets of Railroad Island, unsupervised. Whoever, imagined it was a nuclear family that did it—or a single mother for that matter.

I had heard mutterings of a church with a charismatic leader, who had called his congregants to move into the inner city (the Phillips Neighborhood) and bring the love of Jesus with to transform their neighborhood. I don't know if their goal was their particular goal to convert the druggies, car-burners and sex offenders into stable members of society or if it was simply to push them out and in so doing transform the neighborhood. Anyhow, I thought transformation was an excellent idea and prayed the second would not be unintended consequence. I personally was not interested in simply gentrifying my neighborhood but being a catalyst for change, so that the druggie next door could say that they are no longer a druggie rather than pushing him out into another neighborhood so he can sell drugs to someone else's kids.

So, with this thought in mind, I pulled together some like-minded people, who seemed agreeable to the outrageous plan. We started off by getting to know our neighbors. We did kids night for them and for the other Hmong in the neighborhood. We had kids crawling into every crevice of our existence, in the three houses our atheist neighbor dubbed “Revival Row”. I would often come home from a full day of work in the summer only to start over as kids would see me pull up to my house and come running, screaming my name from all corners of the four block area.

There was, in particular interest to us (because of the numerous police calls), a large house which was always rented out to a large black family. Every family that lived there generally had the same story. Yet the last family was the most challenging of all. They had moved from Chicago to avoid getting shot there. I remember I was the first to meet them and got invited over to the house for a birthday party, by the ten year old who had been wandering the neighborhood, tehn became my shadow for the day. The moment I entered the house through the kitchen, I got yelled at by the toothless grandmother as she sized me up and down while waving her spatula. Her accent was so Chicago I had no idea what she was saying other than “white” this and “black” that. I decided another room in the house was my better option. So, I sat in the dining room with the mother of the child and some other adults and was offered some stuff. I turned it down. I went to the next room to watch TV with the ten year old, which was also the front room of the house. There, four uncles took their turns bringing me plates of food, entertaining me and attempting to bribe my little shadow into leaving. The auntie came by to see what was up and commented, "Wha's yahl's problem? Neva seen a white girl ba’for?" People, all kept coming in, looking through a drawer, while my ten year old and whatever uncle yelled, “It ain’ in there. The stuff ain’ in there.” They also kept checking out the front window every time a car pulled up—likely to figure out if they should be busting out the back. Meanwhile, my little shadow snuggled into me, shuttering in terror at the scary parts of whatever movie was on.

That was how I got tangled into the daily life of my “problem” neighbors.

Eventually Uncle Phil came along. He too like the rest of the family was in and out of our house and lives. We became aware of the possibility that he was a danger to the children and called child protection for this and for a number of other reasons. I had a heated argument over the phone with the lady on the other side who insisted I was reading into the situation. Then one of the guys in our community started getting thick with the family and smoking pot with them and more secrets came out. (Actually, their secrets were generally pretty loud.) Uncle Phil's dangerous!—do not be found alone with him if you are a woman, we were told. That's about the time when one of my roommates confessed to having a crush on him. She invited him into the house. She went out with him. She watched TV with him in his house on his bed. It was his mug shot on the front pages of the paper that explained to her how lucky she had been. She was horrified, ill and left work early that day! Thank God it was a lesson well learned.

There were other close calls of such sort. We were sleeping with the enemy and it was beginning to be difficult to see if our neighbors were converting us to their vices or whether we were converting them. For the most part the later was true. This particular family is now drug and alcohol free. Several uncles and aunts have gone to rehab and they have calm evenings in the house together.

quote

"the very fact that we are human creatures means that 'we cannot but behold, as in a mirror, our own face in those who are poor and despised, who have come to an end of their own power to help themselves, and who groan under their burden, even though they are utter strangers to us.'" Ronald S. Wallace

when you are in a desperate wreck

There was once a man who survived a plane crash into the ocean. He held onto the wreckage of the aircraft waiting for help to come by. He knew he only had a few hours before he would sink. So he began to pray and ask God to save him. During the first hour a woman in a motor boat came along and asked if he needed help. The man said no he was waiting for God to come along and help him. So the woman said okay, suit yourself and continued on her way. He continued to wait and ask God to save him, praying for a miracle. Soon a helicopter came along and dropped down a rope, which the man could touch with his hand. But he refused the help offered and continued to ask God to intervene. Soon a barge came along and stopped to ask if he needed help. The man accepted this offer and climbed onto the barge. As the barge headed to port, they came across the wreckage of a helicopter and a motor boat. The man recognized both to be the same ones that had come to his rescue earlier.

There is a version of this parable out there circulating. This is my rebuttal parable.

killed by a lion

Some of my favorite bible stories are the ones that shock and baffle me. Like the story told in 1 Kings 13 about someone who is simply referred to as a man of God. This man of God from Judah was urged by God to travel to Bethel where King Jeroboam was making an offering. Evidently, God told him where to go at a time when the king was present. And there it was his duty to prophecy against the alter, giving a sign that the alter would split apart and pour out its ashes. The king—angrily—stabs an accusative finger at him, intending to do away with him when the accusative arm suddenly shrivels up and the alter falls apart, pouring out its ashes!

Yet, the interesting part of the story is next. The man of God has been instructed to not eat till he returns home and that he must return a different way than he came. Rather random instructions—no? But the nameless man does his duty in addition to healing the king’s arm. His mission is nearly complete. He has yet to return home.

However, the son’s of a prophet from Bethel run home to tell their father. Their father, a prophet, comes after the man of God and persuades him to come and eat with them at their home, saying an angel had commanded him to invite him. The man of God eats and drinks, when suddenly the prophet receives a word from God against the man of God from Judah. Because he had disobeyed, he would die on foreign soil. The man saddles his donkey to return home when he is met by a lion which kills him on the road and then stands over his body, next to the man’s donkey, in the road until his host comes to get his body to bury him.

What does this mean? Talk about enacted symbolism of judgment. In Jeremiah 5:6 the attack of the lion is a picture of judgment—Therefore a lion from the forest will attack them, a wolf from the desert will ravage them, a leopard will lie in wait near their towns to tear to pieces any who venture out... Nature itself cries out against the rebellion of humankind.
Why did the man from Judah die for being deceived by a prophet from Bethel?