time to breathe

This weekend Jade, Elliot, and all of us in the first year Servant Partners class took our first retreat together. West L.A. Baptist kindly opened up their facilities for us to stay in, so Friday evening after work all the Pasadena folks squished into a car together with all of our stuff for the weekend and drove down there. It turned out to be a very restful weekend. It's been a hard last two weeks emotionally, so taking time to enjoy people and connect with Jesus was just what I needed.

A few of the highlights from the weekend included shooting hoops in the West L.A. Baptist gym (I miss playing basketball!); spending hours alone with God listening, praying and journaling; sharing and singing together; going bowling; playing frisbee on the sand by the Santa Monica Pier, and eating ice cream between DELICIOUS chocolate chocolate chip walnut Ditty Reese cookies. :) It was great to spend down time with the South L.A. folks, since it's hard to really connect and chat at our regular meetings, as they are always scheduled full. One of the most impactful moments of the weekend was a time of healing prayer that started out focusing on one intern's back pain and ended up with God bringing out all kinds of emotional crap in our whole class surrounding issues of comparisons, envy, inadiquacy, and pride. It was amazing to see how just like when Jesus healed people in the book of Luke, God's picture of healing for us extends so far beyond the healing that we envision for ourselves, and he knows what the deeper issues at play are even when we ourselves are unaware of them. Knowing that God knows where we need healing so much better than I do is deeply encouraging to my journey of learning to trust him.

Now I'm back in the regular pattern of life, trying to job search during what free time I have between working and Servant Partners and Northwest Neighbors. Diamante and I have been pouring over presidential candidates' information on the web. We joked that we're going to vote for the person with the prettiest and easiest to read website (Obama's definitely winning on that count). It's so exciting to me that a biracial man and a woman are running for president this year. If you had asked me even a year or so ago if I thought a woman would be running for president with a viable chance at making it anytime in the near future, I would have said no. It's been a LONG time in coming. Our country will be so much healthier and balanced when we have wise input from people of both genders and many ethnic backgrounds determining our policies and direction.

It's also exciting to see the impact that Hillary and Obama's candidacy is having even for the kids in our neighborhood. In the last Northwest Neighbors high school Bible study, when they were talking about the election, one of the multiracial high school girls asked, "What does it take to become President? Could I be president?" :)

the darkness around us

I feel like the world has been falling apart this week. I am doing fine, but there are so many people going through crises around me that I don't even know what to do with it.
There's one dear lady at work whose husband died unexpectedly a month ago, and she's back at work now but with so much pain still carried with her. She and her two children are having a really hard time coping with the grief--and I can't even imagine how much it must hurt to unexpectedly lose your best friends of decades.
One of our volunteers was in our office yesterday morning helping with data entry when she got a call that her mother-in-law had just died. Poor thing. So she of course left right away to go cope with that, but not before tearing up and crying at her desk.
Then there's the sister of one of my Servant Partners' friends who got into a really bad go-cart accident and her foot was totally shredded. The doctors are doing what they can, but it's not healing too well at the moment, and it's pretty black from lack of oxygen.
Then there's a kid, who's a friend of a friend, who was shot three times in the back in front of his church in Monrovia by a car of gang members. He's in the hospital in critical condition and they are praying that his spine and internal organs are ok.
Finally, another friend, who I know through both Servant Partners and work, is currently trying to help a couple women and one of the daughters in her neighborhood get out of a really messy abusive situation, as the women are ready to leave, but because of the details of this particular situation, they either aren't eligible for government/shelter housing (did you know that there are no transitional stay abuse shelters close to the Pasadena/Lincoln Heights area who accept a girl of twelve along with her mother? you have to be under 9. wtf? what happens to abused teenagers?), or the options that they are eligable for will take months to two years to come through. It's so unbelievable that I don't even know what to think. So my friend's been making calls and talking to different government people, but she's so frustrated. They've opened their own home up as a short-term solution, but that won't work for long. And between the three salaries of the women who need a place to stay, they can't even afford to rent a place of their own even IN their low-income neighborhood.
So all that's been on my mind, including a couple recent rapes and a robbery in the south L.A. neighborhood area. Sometimes all of the darkness of this world just seems to explode out of control. I'm praying but I feel so overwhelmed.

Charity & solidarity

"When people begin moving beyond charity and towards justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: 'When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me communist.' Charity wins awards and applause, but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them."
The Irresistible Revolution, by Shane Claiborne

Thoughts?

A different kind of New Year's

I had a wonderful time visiting family and friends for a week in Oregon for Christmas. There are certain benefits to working a temporary job that can give you time off! The more I'm drawn into other peoples' lives and learn about their families, the more I am thankful for mine. We're definitely not perfect, but my parents have done a wonderful job raising four children who love to learn and who love people. I'm thankful for the work that they have put into persevering in a committed, healthy and loving marriage, and I'm impressed at the effort that they have put into lovingly raising their bicultural children when they themselves grew up in only one of those cultures. I confess that I'm a little intimidated by the prospect of raising kids as well as my parents' have, but I suppose you do the best you can and pray a lot! Or as one parent once said to me only half-jokingly, save up money for their counseling! At least this particular life quandary is not anywhere in my near future, so I shalln't worry about it for now.

I came back to California on the 30th of December, as I worked a half day on New Year's Eve. Diamante (my roommate) and I had been debating all through Christmas break about what we should do for New Year's Eve. One option was to go to a party with other Servant Partners interns, which would have been a lot of fun and very low stress, since we already enjoy being around our fellow interns and wouldn't have had to plan anything. The other option was to invite some of the neighborhood girls that we've been working with over. This felt a lot more intimidating and uncertain, a leap into the unknown. But as we talked about it and prayed about it, we really felt like we should take the risk. I simply couldn't get the story that Jesus tells in Luke 14 out of my mind, when he says "When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed." I don't think that Jesus was saying, "never celebrate with people you know and love", since he did go to wedding parties and ate in friends' homes. But he was saying something important about what it means to be a follower of God. Anyway, I couldn't stop thinking about those words, and I also couldn't come up with a time when I'd ever really practiced them. Inviting college freshmen to things is about as close as I've gotten, and that's not too close.

So we decided to take the risk and hope for the best! I called the junior high girls, but all of the ones that I could get a hold of were busy that evening with family. Diamante managed to get a hold of two of the high school girls who decided to come. We fed them a late dinner, watched half a movie, played a couple games, snacked, chatted, and set off poppers at midnight. It was a pretty chill evening, since four people isn't exactly a crazy party! I confess that both during the evening and afterwards, I was fairly anxious as to whether or not they were enjoying themselves. But looking back on it now, while it was important to try to love them as best we could, ultimately no matter what the result, the two of us were obedient to follow our convictions and to choose the riskier option. And who knows what the ultimate effect of that night will be, both in the long-term picture of relationship building with the girls and in our own lives learning to follow the Spirit of God?