Into the whirlwind

My first few days of Servant Partners have been a whirlwind--good, but I can hardly catch my breath. Friday night (the 31st) was our first get-together as a class at Kevin Blue's house (the director of the SP internship), so we had a barbeque, socialized for a while, and then gathered for more specific details about the internship, like safety requirements and things like that.

Saturday we did intensive manuscript study of the first part of Nehemiah all day. For those who don't know what that is, manuscript study usually involves studying a portion of the Bible printed out onto paper so that you can write all over it (repetitions, questions you have, observations, etc), and you usually suppliment your intensive study and discussion of the actual passage with other resources such as Bible dictionaries, concordances, atlases, and other texts which help you better understand the context, or word meanings, or whatever else you are trying to find out about the text. I have loved our study of Nehemiah so far! It's so interesting to consider the strategies with which he pioneered the project to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, as well as looking at his relationship to God, and I'm struck by all of the possible parallels to our future in a neighborhood in northwest Pasadena. The one downer is that it has been HOT!!! We study in Kevin's garage (converted into a room) so it is quite hot plus the air is still (ick). This makes it hard to concentrate on more Nehemiah in the afternoon after lunch!

This evening we studied more Nehemiah, but thankfully the earlier part of the day was different--all the second year interns took us to the beach (yay!) and we enjoyed lots of sunshine, good food, games and ocean water to cool us off. I learned how to dive into a breaking wave to avoid being smushed! The ocean was so much fun to play in after four years of going to beautiful but very cold Oregon beaches. Today was also a good opportunity to bond more as an intern class as well as with the second years. My class has 16 people--8 men and 8 women. This is a beautiful thing! The last couple years each class had only had a couple men in it, and so the SP staff were praying a lot for men, and thank God men came! I think that it's really healthy and fun when there's a good balance between the genders and you can have both as friends.
I'm staying up in Pasadena with the second year interns here, so every night it's about a 40 minute drive from south L.A. up to their apartment. We end at Kevin's at about 10:30 pm, so it's late by the time I get here, and so far I've gotten to bed between midnight and 2 am each night. In the morning I carpool down with two of the Pasadena first year guys, leaving here about 8:20 am so we can get there by 9.

Last night we had our first adventure in Pasadena--Ben, Kevin and I were driving along Washington St (fairly main street for NW Pasadena) back home after our evening session and a back tire blew out. We tried driving on the rim, but this sounded so painful for the car that we just found the nearest place to pull over and park. Kevin still had half of the stuff that he moved down to Pasadena with in the car, so we had to unload all this onto the sidewalk so that we could get at the spare...and then it took a bit to figure out how this particular jack worked...and then to do the labor of changing it. Mind you, this is not a good street to be stranded on at midnight on a Saturday night! So we prayed for protection and changed the tire (well, Kevin did most of it and I watched and learned and held an open cell phone when we needed light), and thank God no one came along to bother us and we got it changed and all drove off safely.

Unfortunately, the guys had a second unpleasant surprise this morning when they were woken up by gunshots. In a house just a few houses down from the apartment they were sleeping in, one person died this morning and one was stabbed. They had to walk out of the street since it was all cordoned off with police tape. The guys are understandably experiencing a little bit of anxiety because of this event, but it's also heart-breaking to think about the victims and their families and friends. This particular incident is looking like domestic violence (http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_6789387), but it's in the midst of a spike in violence in this area. Apparently there have been a number of shootings in northwest Pasadena in recent months (for those of you who aren't familiar with the area, the northwest section has very different demographics and community dynamics than "Old Town" or the wealthier neighborhoods here) . I didn't know this before, but there is actually a "season" for this sort of thing; it's during the summer months when it's hot and more people are outside and wandering around at night. Isn't that tragic??!! How would you feel if your community had a season every year when people started dying? I was told that a lot of this current violence stems from conflict between Latino and African American gang members, particularly with the present nationwide debate about immigration, and perceptions (I have no idea if they are true or not) that African Americans are losing jobs to Latinos. It's sad not only that these gang youth are dying, but also that innocent people are being caught in crossfire as well. So anyways, we prayed for the guys and we also prayed for the victims and their families. If those of you who are praying folk could pray for those families as well, I'd really appreciate it. I confess that it still seems a bit distant to me, though the part that struck me the most was when we drove by the house tonight and there was a cross made out of candles that someone or multiple people had created on the sidewalk outside the house. I can still see the little lights flickering in the darkness.

I'm not posting this to scare anyone (Mom and Dad, I'm quite a number of streets away from where it happened, this neighborhood has apparently been much quieter on that front) and I hope no one now thinks I'm crazy for moving down here (or maybe you do and you love me anyway). For me, it's more of a sobering reminder that there are a massive number of people in L.A. and in the world who are living in settings with suffering like this, and that I have the choice to enter into this community here, a choice that not everyone has. And while I confess that part of me is a bit scared and intimidated, a larger part of me is wondering what it means to walk with people who are suffering, and who are oppressed--and also who have a lot of beauty and gifts and potential. I'm not very far along my own faith journey and I still have so much to learn, but from where I'm looking now, I can't seem to reconcile the way that Jesus lived and the way he taught his followers to live with a lifestyle that involves rejecting risk, or disengaging from hard realities, or choosing comfort in the times that means backing away from potentially uncomfortable but transformative relationships or situations. Jesus took his followers through places of risk, of discomfort, of crossing barriers that they had previously had between ethnic groups and economic classes--but he also demonstrated companionship in going into those risks as well as the power to bring real renewal and healing. The only reason that I have hope choosing to live and invest in northwest Pasadena is not because I think that I am going to save the city or stop the shootings in my own power, but because I have at least a smidgen of trust that God longs for restoration, and that he longs to work with people who follow him to bring restoration to people and places, and that in God, restoration is really, actually possible. I have no idea what this looks like, but I am choosing to go on the journey.