Garden days

This year, in addition to running the helping with homework, Ruthie has worked with volunteers, student leaders, and the kids to develop a community garden, where kids can help grow veggies to cook and eat in the afterschool program.

Here's one picture of some of the kids with Theresa, a faithful and caring friend of ours and the neighborhood. Miguel is taking a break from planting to stick his face in front of the camera:

The kids took home starter plants to nurture, then brought them to the garden to plant:

The Creek Kids had a great chance to play in the dirt and spend time together on the garden. We have one garden day each week:

Team USA

-People are starting to talk about our team, so we need a name, I say as Marco takes another shot.

The ball goes sailing over the goal and toward the creek. Ivan puts on his socks on the sideline.

-Los Immigrants, Adrian suggests.

-How 'bout HB-87s? Alan jokes.

-No. I got it. USA. It's simple, Omar says, looking around for any dissent. Heads nod around the circle of players as it forms. Like that, we become USA.

This takes place on a Tuesday. We are fresh off a win against a team that beat us twice before I took over coaching. While we gather around, kicking soccer balls, joking in Spanglish, getting ready to do our sprints, the feeling is that we can make this little neighborhood team into something good.

I'm still reeling from the fact that I'm even here. Guys on this team have made fun of us, written obscenities on our door, picked on kids in our afterschool program, and generally avoided us for peer pressure reasons.

Then, one night while they watched a police officer grill some of the neighbors on something, I asked Ivan and Bon Bon what was going on. They shrugged, then asked, Hey, you wanna coach our soccer team?

I showed up at the first practice, not sure how things were gonna go. Then Omar, the other coach, who supposedly couldn't coach anymore because of a job at QT, showed up too.

It's been a bit messy ever since. Our players go back to Mexico, get distracted when their parents go to prison, show up to practice under the influence, and sometimes burst into tears. There are alliances and insecurities and everyone has to watch his back most of the time.

But we've started playing like a team. We're learning to build each other up. We're taking some pride in who we are, and where we come from.

For the first three years in this neighborhood, I prayed that God would give me a way to connect with the middle and high school guys. They are at risk right now for gang involvement, drug use, incarceration, gun violence and deportation. It's a good time to show them love.

Now, living out God's answer as their coach is a confusing, turbulent, hilarious adventure. It demands about ten hours a week in addition to my writing and ministry work. But the time, sweat, and pain are well worth it, to be involved in the turnaround we're seeing, to get to play during scrimmages, and to see the development of pride they've taken in who we are together, as team USA.

Thanksgiving in July

This morning, on my drive to work, I did some thinking about this blog, where I have done a great deal of wrestling, where I have spilled some of my doubts and the mess of my life, and where I have proclaimed victories as they run through my hands.

And to those who read and to those who follow, I must give thanks. Without you, this is a clanging gong. It's a waste apart from you. So here are a few thanks I offer:

To Uncle Tim, who made this whole project possible. By loving us, inviting us, placing us here, and showing us how to make neighborhood ministries work.

To Dad, who tells me that he sees God's hand leading my life, which makes me tear up, but I keep cool for the sake of the conversation. To Mom, who loves patiently and hears the truth in the mess of the things I write here. To Lisa, Eric, and Gina. I'm proud to be a part of this wild clan.

To Adam Fites, who walks before me into the corners of man's mind, past those corners to the glory beyond.

To David Park, who fought for me, beside me, who gives to the Father's work in our life and in our neighborhood. To Josh, who has mastered at least three art forms (music, design, and bike mechanics), and still pretends like he's no big deal. To Jonathan and Kelly, who live more boldly than I ever could. And to Tim Isaacson, who inspires and leads us through the mess of life here in Chamblee.

To Eric Beach, for giving my writing a home back in the Brew days, and for the things you've said about it ever since.

To Kacie, an old friend with the courage to listen, read, think, and speak, all at the right times. To Ernesto, whose writing and reading led to the birth of this whole messy project, and whose work leaves me trembling, breathless. To Keith Evers, who supported us, housed us, and showed us what faithful friendship looks like.

To Jeremy, the brother of my heart. I know you read this stuff. You are, and have been, the best friend I could have hoped for.

Okay, I had about ten more, but this is starting to feel pretty sappy, so maybe I'll do another one of these later. To those listed here, and to the rest of you who follow, I feel that you are reading. I read your comments carefully, and they move me. Thank you.

Rwanda, Caanan, and Chamblee

We are sending some of our best friends, Jonathan and Kelly Nolte, off to Rwanda in the next few weeks, so tonight we gathered to watch a movie about the genocide that happened there called Beyond the Gates. As you can imagine, it wasn't a very cheery movie. In fact, during the first hour, I was thinking, why doesn't God just blow this world up and start over?

One of the main characters in the film is a Catholic priest. As a horde of Hutus are about to rape and butcher their Tutsi neighbors, a young man asks the priest where God is.

"He's right here, suffering with these people" the priest replies, declining a ride that would take him from the massacre to safety.

That line rattled around in my head for a while. Not in the "it reminded me of a nice idea that I forgot" kind of way, but because it didn't sit well with me. At some point, I have to wonder how much it really hurts him, because he could stop it if he wanted to.

Rwanda isn't the only place that makes me feel this way. I see irreperable scars in my neighborhood. Kids get abused, raped, and abandoned. They build defenses against love. I do some writing for a nonprofit that works with women who are victims of sex trafficking, short-term marriages, slavery, starvation, neglect, and destitution. At some point, if it really bothers God all that much, why doesn't he just stop the awful stuff from happening?

I thought about Rwanda, then I thought about how the Canaanites probably felt when the Israelites came in with divine orders to wipe out every man, woman, child,and cow . Then I thought about friends who died young, and all the scars that their leaving formed in my heart, and I thought that there had to be something about God to be learned, if I was to believe in him at all.

Since it is all we have, human life seems to us the thing of highest value. But, based on biblical tales and the chaos I see around me, it's not the most important thing to God. He seems very little concerned with our comfort or individual survival.

I believe in a God who mourns with those who suffer. Who hates violence. Who grieves when we grieve. But all this has me thinking that the suffering is worthwhile to God because he has a higher value somewhere.

I'm going to propose my little view, which is that God does indeed hurt, but that he values a relational connection, he values the redemptive narrative, and he values the human struggle more than he values the mere fact of human life, and especially more than he values our neat little ethical systems.

So to survive where I live, where suffering abounds and lives are cut short all the time, I have to believe that the God who presides is telling us a story far bigger than our own lives, and he asks me to worship as he unfolds it before me.

This is going to sound weird coming from a guy who believes that Jesus wants us to care about physical needs and poverty (which I do believe, quite fervently), but I don't think God is out to cure every ailment and alleviate every pain.

If we learn anything from suffering, it's that God's priorities and ours are different. We have a choice. We can accept his values and move further into worship, or we can seek safety and avoid the pain that comes with knowing a God who can bear the weight of our suffering for the sake of something higher, which we can't quite grasp in our current state.

A Flood of Blessings

You can tell how busy I am by the frequency of my posts on this blog.

I recently started a new job as a marketing and communications specialist for She is Safe, a nonprofit serving women in the toughest places on Earth. During my first week at that job, my sister called with the news that her small group wanted to install new flooring in our apartment. Ruthie and I had been praying for new flooring for a while, so we jumped at the opportunity.

In addition to that, a short story I recently wrote for Red Rock Review, a literary journal in Nevada, was noticed by someone who I would hope would notice it, prompting me to launch into editing and expansion of a novel I had been picking away at for a while.

As all these good things crashed into my life, a typo by GEICO resulted in the suspension of my driver's license, leaving me dependent upon the grace of Ruthie to get around.

On Thursday, as I hauled scraps of carpet from our disheveled apartment to a rented UHAUL, I saw some of the high school guys who had written and peed on our door, and I asked them if they knew why a police cruiser was parked nearby. They shrugged, we started talking, and the conversation moved to their soccer team, which they asked me to coach.

So now, I have a new job, a new floor, a new opportunity with the guys in the neighborhood, a chance at getting my weird little novel in front of some helpful readers, and no wheels.

The complicated, unprecedented levels of blessing and difficulty often overwhelm me, but I know that these opportunities come to me from a gracious hand, and I trust that hand to move the story forward in a good direction.

If you are a praying person, please keep us in your prayers. We are caught in a flood of blessings, trying to breathe, love and pray while God's story swirls around and over us.

A Temple to Foreign Gods (dispatches from the trek, pt 3)

Do not trust the gods of the air of Kathmandu.

The thought flashes through my head as our taxi speeds toward Pashupati temple. Jeremy sits beside me, and we watch the city slide by in lurid color, its shacks bearing the stamps of Coca-Cola and Pepsi on bold, hand-painted plywood signs.

Street kids run through alleys bearing paper bags, which they place over their mouths and breathe deeply when their play slows. Western wear and saris dance and weave across sidewalks, shoes and sandals stir the dust of the streets, and we climb the last hill before the temple.

As we hop out of the cab, I see skeletal cows, rooting through piles of garbage like stray dogs.

Don't trust the hamburgers either, I think.

My friend Jeremy, clad in jeans and a soccer jersey, leads the way to the temple complex. He has lived in Kathmandu for a short time, and arranged this trip for me. Since we have one day in the city before beginning our trek to Mount Everest, he wants me to see this temple and get an idea of what kind of power rules this city.

"The kingdom is in us," I say as we approach the guard shack, where westerners are required to purchase tickets before entering. The statement is meant to identify conviction, but it's really a question, the central question of my journey from the outskirts of Atlanta to the base of the world's tallest mountain. I want to know if this kingdom that defines my life to is a real power. I need to know that it moves through cultures and across oceans, and into the temples of foreign gods.

Two weeks before leaving Atlanta, I visited a Hindu temple to open a conversation. After describing the various statues and telling me their stories, emphasizing the commonalities between his faith and mine, the priest took my hand, held it, and pointed to a string of Christmas lights that lined the ceiling tiles. "Many lights, one electric," he told me. I looked at the lights. "Many lights, one power," he said. I held his hand for a moment, watched a wealthy Indian couple approach the gods, then quietly left the room.

Now we walk past boxes filled with powdered dyes, oranges and yellows and reds, for some ceremonial purpose I don't understand. We mill past stalls, past shadus, the holy men with long beards, robes, round bellies, and painted faces. Jeremy tells me not to take photos of them lest they pursue us for money.

Ahead, I see a group of tourists standing on the concrete riverbank, cameras in hand, snapping photos. I turn to see their subject, and on the other side of the river are small gazebos with rectangular fires crackling and scorching. Near to the fires rest human forms, under fabric shrouds. In clusters standing by walls beyond the pyres stand Nepalis, milling around, chatting, watching the flames. Their dead are burning before us, and their possessions, now poisoned by mortality, are hurled into the grimy river below.

I gape at the shrouded bodies, feeling a tension over the ceremony before us. I come from a land where death is hidden from society's eyes, tucked away in nursing homes, and sanitized in funerals. Here it is, final, grotesque, and public.

A body goes onto the lumber. Men in tank tops uncover a face, light the head on fire, and the next funeral begins.

We mill on through the complex, where we see dozens of shrines, each with a phallic sculpture at its center. Explicit carvings outside the shrines depict horrific gods presiding over complex orgies. Nepalis mill around us, some seeking profit from the tourists, some seeking favor from the spirits, some to give themselves to worship of the gods.

Several buildings say, "Hindus only" on the outside, barring westerners from seeing inside. I ask Jeremy what goes on behind these walls. He shrugs and tells me we're in a fertility temple, so one can imagine, but he hasn't been inside.

We find a long set of stairs climbing up to a hill overlooking the city, and begin to walk. Here, moving away from the vivid altars to mortality and sexuality, I try to process what I am seeing. I am an alien here, so I am bound to feel confused by the native forms of worship, but there is a seething force in the air which troubles me.

This is my first day in Nepal, so I pass the sights quietly, waiting to understand, hoping that in the mess and mystery of this journey, as it runs through this complex, the city of Kathmandu, and the great mountains beyond, the kingdom of Christ will take on skin and offer hope. For the moment, it remains hidden in my heart, a small alien light in a noisy temple to local gods.

A Short Goodbye (pt 3)

My phone rings late on Sunday afternoon as I trudge through dense undergrowth somewhere on the Near West Side of Atlanta. Jonathan and Kelly Nolte have invited me to join them in the search for a massive, hidden quarry that they saw in a TV show, but all we've found so far are vines, thorns, and barbed wire fences.

I pull the phone from my pocket just as it stops ringing. The caller ID tells me that I missed a call from Steven Finn. He and his wife, Rebecca, have been giving Susan and Astry rides to and from church for over a year.

I pocket the phone, deciding to focus on escaping the woods alive. A few minutes later, I get a text from Steven asking if I can call him when I get a chance.

We emerge from the forest into a rundown neighborhood and find our way back to the Noltes' car. I sit in the passenger seat, pull a few thorns out of my legs, check for ticks, and then call Steven. He has the beginning of a miracle on his hands here, and he tells me about it as we race North on I-85.

Susan and her family, in the face of poor wages, stood to lose their small apartment, and were planning to go stay with family until they could find more work. They decided to ask Steven if there was any way he could help.

A few days ago someone anonymously gave Steven $600 for youth ministry in the neighborhood around Open Table Community. So now Steven's wondering if God didn't do that to provide for this very situation. I encourage him to call Susan back and find out a) what the long term plan is, and b) exactly how much money Susan's family needs.

After I hang up, I discuss the Situation with Jonathan.

-Yeah, he tells me, we can either use that money to buy cookies and lemonade or to actually help the youth stay in the neighborhood.

That night, Steven calls me and lets me know what he found out. Susan's family needs exactly $600 to finish out their lease, and the money would buy the family time to look for new work, finish out the school year, and prepare for a proper move. And it would give us just a little more time with two of our favorite kids.

-They need exactly $600? That's exactly how much you have, right?

-Yeah.

-Well, this sounds like a no-brainer.

-Yeah.

We talk about logistics, and we rave a little bit back and forth about how God seems to be showing his hand here. Susan accepts the grace of Jesus one week, then receives the love of his church, then God provides for her family's material needs. We really can't wrap our heads around this series of events.

The next day, when Steven goes to the gas station to buy the money order to pay for their rent, he only brings the $600. Because he doesn't have any other money with him, the staff just gives him the order for free, making sure that this kindness just passes through Steven from one place to another.

When he gives the money order to the family, he asks Susan to translate for him, and tells them that God provided the right amount of money just for this situation.

When I hear this, I spend the next couple of hours giving thanks and wondering exactly what the Father is trying to build into our character through this miracle.

He placed us here to show His love, provided the resources, and then opened a door for us to care for a family on every level, from spiritual to economic. Maybe he's trying to show us that it's all one thing, that the Gospel, when accepted and lived, encompasses all of who we are, and the kingdom we have been given passes through our fingers in tangible ways to the world around us.

What this teaches us, and how this truth resonates through God's work in the months ahead, remains to be seen. We wait with eyes open. One miracle opens the door for many more, and we expect to believe in them and be changed.