Fall Festival- Cornerstone Kids

This Saturday, we ran from the yard sale over to Huntington Creek, where a team from Cornerstone Christian Academy ran a major fall festival, complete with a clown, balloon animals, face painting, popcorn, and games.

Yard Sale

Saturday's yard sale was a success on pretty much any scale you could apply to a yard sale. We were able to raise some money for the thrift store, connect with our neighbors, distribute goods at low cost, and, perhaps most importantly, wear silly hats.

Ruthie's dad and his friend Betty showed up. Betty faithfully ran the cash box, braving the early morning chill then the blazing sun, all just because she likes to help.

Black, White, Asian, and Latino visitors all mingled as they walked through the stuff, staring scornfully at lamps in hope of driving a hard bargain. We barely put up any fight if anyone asked for any kind of deal.

Stephanie, one of the key players in making this thrift store happen, ran the children's clothing tent. Here, she smiled for a picture. Our dear friend David took the opportunity to do Lord-knows-what with his face, to be captured on film and posted on the internet forever.

Theresa, one of our most faithful ministry partners, hung all sorts of clothes from trees and arranged items neatly on picnic tables for the neighborhood's browsing pleasure:

Jonathan Nolte of Communicycle sold a few bikes as well, providing affordable, much-needed transportation to our new friends:

Some of the kids from Huntington Creek served as helpers, and some just came to shop. Between errands, Ruthie got a second to pose with Leslie and Karina, who are way too cool to really smile for a picture:

And here's our helper of the day, Miguel, holding a shoe. Don't ask me why:

Yard Sale in Chamblee!

I was talking to the student leaders in our afterschool program one day, and I asked them what they thought about opening a thrift store. Their faces lit up.

"OH! I took two classes on marketing! I can work there!" Miguel told me.

"Don't listen to him. I'm the one who should work there," Laura said.

Tomorrow, we take our first step toward developing a sustainable thrift store to meet material and economic needs in our neighborhood. We will hold a massive yard sale at Open Table Community Church in Chamblee.

If you live in the Atlanta area, please stop by. It will be at 2605 Chamblee-Tucker Road in Chamblee, GA, and we will have all sorts of stuff out between 8 AM and 12 Noon. Communicycle will be selling bikes there as well.

If you don't live in the area, don't worry. You can pray for shoppers to turn up, and you can stay tuned as we develop this into an exciting ministry to reach the families in our neighborhood.

Renovation

If you walk into our apartment today, you will see a living room with a bare floor, a dining room with no chairs, and a kitchen full of the odds and ends that we picked up from all over the house.

We have removed everything from the carpet for a cleaning, which is the final step in restoring the apartment to make it liveable.

The parallell between the gutting, repair, and deep cleaning which is underway in our apartment and the gutting, repair, and deep cleaning that took place in my mind and heart during the nightmarish month of October is so obvious that I thought for a second that it might be too obvious to even mention.

But it is worth noting. We have been through some serious renovation lately. We had to look at everything in our lives from possessions to activities to relationships, and determine if we should keep, exchange, or dispose of them.

As the apartment awaits its final cleaning, we are searching ourselves before we re-engage, making sure that we have purified, realigned, and reorganized so that every corner of our lives will be as ready as possible for whatever comes next.

Springer Mountain Blues

Those of you who are my Facebook friends might remember the photo shown above. On a twenty-mile-long training run on the Appalachian Trail, I was attacked by a bee at mile ten right after the turnaround, leaving me with no choice but to run back to my car with my lip bouncing out in front of me.

I was understandably nervous about returning to the trail that humiliated me so badly last time, but I needed to get in a strenuous 15-mile run, and the round trip from Amicalola Falls to the Appalachian Trail trailhead atop Springer Mountain fit the bill (I added .25 miles walking from the parking lot to this sign, to those who are questioning my math).

I have been quite heavy-hearted about how things are going lately, not to mention physically drained. I felt exhausted on the run, opting to walk for large chunks of it. When I got up to the top of Springer, a big crowd had gathered and the smell of raw feces was thick in the air. I had a hiker snap this picture before heading home.
Out on the trail, I did a lot of thinking that led me mostly in circles, and I ended up just asking God to clear the way for us a bit. Sometimes it's hard to even know what to ask for.

A Few Caveats

One of the decisions I have made with this blog is to keep it honest. So when we see things a certain way, or when something is a struggle for us, or when we don't like the way things are going, I try to say so.

This has been good and bad. Sometimes people involved read our blogs and are not exactly thrilled with the things we say. Sometimes those people's feelings really matter to us.

In the last few months, I've posted about two things which warrant an update, and maybe a correction:

• The political problems that I discussed at our church have been resolved. Our relationships are healthy and loving. We just had to get through a rough patch. I still struggle with the big concept of church, but thankfully we have peace at our little church.
  
• I have taken out some frustrations with our apartment management on this blog as well. But they care about us, and they seem to want us there. It's just a difficult job to keep a complex in working order. We understand that, and we hope to develop a more positive relationship with the new property manager in the future.

So I won't go back and unwrite the things I've written, but I would like to qualify them with the fact that we are not really qualified to judge why or how people do what they do, and that we are thankful for the team we have to work with, both at church and in the apartment office.

In the Air: a summary of recent events

We agreed with the former manager of Huntington Creek to live and work out of an apartment to help build and educate the neighborhood at no cost to the property.

Recently, there was a management change that coincided with the discovery of mold in our apartment. We notified the new manager, asked her to take steps to fix the problem, and moved out temporarily so that the work could get done. She gave us a two-week timeline.

A month has passed, and the mold is still multiplying, the ceiling is still soggy from a leak upstairs. Because of this delay, someone learned that we were not there and broke into our home, stealing our valuables.

When this happened, management called us only to try to collect money for the window.

So the question we face now, with no apparent progress on the apartment, with the school year progressing for the kids, and with our time and money ticking away, is what does all of this mean for us? If we believe in a God who is in control- a pretty difficult concept to grasp at the moment- then where is He leading us through this mess?

Are we to renew our committment to the neighborhood and wait out the problems, losing money, time, and credibility with the neighbors? Are we to switch locations and start new work? Should I consider alternate work? Further education?

Everything is up in the air, and we can't predict where it will land.