One Thing After Another

Yesterday morning, my friend Aaron called unexpectedly. He is a trucker, and his work brought him through Atlanta. He spent the night at our place last night, and asked me if I wanted to help with a job he had to do. We awoke this morning and set out to get the job done.

While I was out, Eric taught guitar lessons to Melvin, Jennifer, and Lesly. They had a great time. Ruthie kept hearing them erupt into laughter.



I got home from an intense day's work just in time to meet our friends Josh and Margaret. We watched The Triplets of Belleville, one of my favorite movies.

Josh is a stellar musician, as is my brother Eric. After the movie, we all started jamming, but I quickly realized that my continued participation could only hurt the musical outcome.

Right before Josh and Margaret left, we opened a great conversation about work in this community. We walked them out to their car, then had to tear ourselves from the conversation so they could get home.

Philosophy of Guitar

Yesterday was the first day of Eric's summer guitar class. He had been thinking about spending some time with different philosophical ideas about music related to perception and emotional resonance, but when the class showed up, it became clear that another approach might work better:

Blanca and her brother Alicio have been coming to our center since we moved here. Blanca does much of the cleaning and housework in her apartment, helps her mom sell tamales in the neighborhood, and cares for her brother. She's a very busy kid.

It turns out, she's also a killer guitarist. Eric was amazed at how quickly she picked up the chords and started playing. We hope she keeps coming to these lessons. It would be a great skill for her to develop so early.

After getting home from work, I went out for tea with Josh Feit and David Park from Open Table Community, and we talked about the difficulties of a multicultural approach to ministry, how to talk about our unconventional approaches to Christian work, good music, and Triumph the Comic Insult Dog.

It was so good that midnight snuck up on us, and the staff kept checking if we were going to leave yet.