The Margins

I just received an email from Doug with the news that friends of ours who just had a baby (born prematurely but thankfully healthy and able to go home) are now facing a new crisis: she is in the hospital in the ICU receiving treatments for blood clots in her lungs. I shuddered reading the email, reminded again of those horrible days after Mercy’s birth.

It reminded me too of how comfortable I can become in my “do this and you will be blessed” approach to life with God. There are plenty of places in scripture that commend this way of thinking, and yet there are as many, it would seem, that defy it. Like my good friend, John Goldingay, likes to put it: the Proverbs say, “live this way and you will be blessed”, then the Psalms, Job and Ecclesiastes say, “we tried it and it doesn’t work!”

At some point, the transactional approach to life with God simply breaks down.

I am thinking of a family friend who, as a very young and newly married woman, decided with her husband to adopt a baby whose mother had been a serious drug abuser during the pregnancy. They were prepared for any number of physical impairments, disability, and challenge with this child. The baby was born healthy and has had not a single health concern as a result of his mother’s abuse. A few years later, this same couple conceived and gave birth to another baby. She did everything right during her pregnancy, and yet it was this birth and this child that were marked by physical challenges and suffering.

Life with God can never be boiled down to a “terms of agreement”. It is not like those online forms where you rapidly scroll through a bunch of text to click the “I agree” button at the end. It is always, and has always been, about a relationship. The thing is, the transaction is safer than the relationship. The transaction allows us to live with a high level of confidence and control. I would also suggest that the transaction can drastically inhibit humility and impede grace: “Thank you God that I am not like…”

I am guilty of living an entitlement faith. Often enough these past four years, I have seriously challenged God over things that have happened to us here. I have clamored after and disputed what I think we “deserve” and I have been quick to cry foul. Like when I was lying in an ICU bed, separated from my newborn baby, facing a condition that most often kills. That was not a “blessing” that I had signed up for.

And yet at the center of my faith is a God who gives me exactly what I do not deserve. Will I dare to choose a relationship, or will I continue to demand a transaction…

Yesterday afternoon we stuffed our children into fleecy little Old Navy costumes and made our way over to a Halloween carnival sponsored by the neighborhood homeowner’s association. We are not ourselves homeowners, but we were invited by my sister and our good friends who are.

It was a great little party set in the front yards of a few neighbors on a hidden little street a block from where our church used to meet at the 24th street school. They had a huge jumper set up, good food and games, and the personal highlight for me: pony rides! Doug claims that I was more excited about this than Mercy (and after watching the video he took of us arriving and of me seeing the ponies, I have to say he is right).

Mercy the purple dragon did a lap around the street riding a cute little pony, she chased the goats and chickens in the little petting zoo, she went into the jumper for about a minute, then found a lawnmower push toy that held her attention for quite some time. Aaron just floundered about in his little frog suit, utterly adorable, taking in all the sights and sounds.

We came to this event last year also, and I had the same experience this time around of feeling just so strange. There we were, in the heart of our community,  surrounded by almost entirely Anglo people, in front of beautiful homes, with people who would be perfectly at home in the place where I grew up. Living in our neighborhood, I am aware that these people exist here: the wealthy professionals and gay couples who have bought some of the exquisite homes here and lovingly restored them. But I rarely notice them (they are not often seen walking on the streets or playing in the park with their kids). While they quietly live here, on hidden and closed off streets, other elements of our community are much more visible and make so much more noise.

At one point, a woman walked up to me at this party and handed me a flier inviting me to a “wine and cheese” event. I just looked at her.

It will take some effort for me to remember that these folks are my neighbors too.

I have mentioned before the influence of the book, “Go, Dog, Go” on my daughter’s imagination. The climax of this story is the dramatic arrival of a bunch of different colored dogs, all driving cars, at a giant tree. At the top of the tree, the dogs discover a magnificent party: “A dog party,” the book proclaims!

Mercy has a very random collection of little animals, each belonging to a different set of toys or to some game. They were never intended to belong together, but Mercy’s favorite activity each day is to set these figures up, in varying configurations, on top of her bookshelf, the TV stand, my desk or the futon arm. Once assembled, she steps back with great admiration and shouts to me: “My dog party!”

Last night we went to our first gathering of our new small group. Our church used to basically BE a small group, so it is a noticeable change for us to begin gathering in smaller fellowship groups around our neighborhood. As I sat in our neighbor’s backyard, with taquitos frying on an outside range and kids of varying ages running around with all manner of balls and bikes, I couldn’t help but think about Mercy’s motley gatherings in our living room. We were a truly random bunch, and I marveled at the fact that God, in his grace to us, had made it possible for us to make the journey to this place in each other’s lives.

‘In my experience and observation simply offering better Bible teaching has not produced better disciples.’

Or put another way - ‘it hasn’t worked’….

I hear many people looking for churches with ‘good teaching’, but I am yet to hear anyone seeking a church that is committed to ‘doing the Bible stuff’.

From the Backyard Missionary

I stumbled upon a great blog entry by Chris Spinks (via Tyler Watson) that contained what I found to be a provocative analogy. He likens churches to planned suburban developments: places where form and structure and character are all prescribed before anyone actually ever dwells there.

Too often, as I see it, suburbs and suburban-like churches lay all of the well-designed streets, create beautiful green spaces in among the cookie-cutter homes and establish neighborhood regulations to keep everything in order.

He then talks about what continues to attract him to his church which he feels operates in a manner quite contrary to this: in his words, “community comes before construction.”

At [our church], we seem to move forward, mess up, back up and try again. Or we proceed knowing that we will flesh out all the details as we go. We have some basic structure in place, but it never preempts the primacy of community. Sometimes we design the structure as we move along…This could be misread to mean that I think planning is nonsense. That is not the case. It is rather a case of WHO does the planning. Does the community itself do the planning or does some oxymoronic “community” developer draw up the plans before a community even exists?

We are church-planting here in our community (yes, even though it has already been four years, I definitely would still describe us as a church-plant). My husband is our worship pastor and we talk all the time about the nature and purpose of Sunday worship. And I find Spinks’ analogy a helpful illustration in explaining the tensions that we sometimes feel.

Doug and I long for our church to be a place where our corporate worship is genuinely a “work of the people” and not, using Spinks’ analogy, a vacant, attractive gated community of homes constructed by careful “developers”. What we long for is something much more corporate and organic. But corporate and organic translates to slow and messy, which almost always run counter to the impulses for quick, Sunday-driven growth (a special pitfall for a new church).

As we like to remind ourselves often, there is nowhere else we would rather be. We are grateful for the conversation partners God has given us here. And grappling with these issues alongside those we call family is what we believe the life of a Christ-followers is all about.

If you have a minute, take a look at Chris’ full post and share your thoughts.

Driving home yesterday afternoon, I came across the filming frenzy of blocked off streets, semis, and trailers a few blocks from our house. I had seen the little film placards with “CSI” on them, so I wasn’t surprised to see a bunch of fake Las Vegas police cars parked along the street where they were filming.

After making my way through the production-congested street, I cruised by my good friend’s house a block away to drop off something she had asked us to pick up for her daughter while we were at the Babies R Us. She wasn’t home, so we continued down her street to loop back around to our house. As we passed a house that has been a special hot-bed for criminal activity the past year, I saw some young men going inside, while another guy whipped his large, shiny SUV (with rims costing more than my entire car) around in front of me, stopped to shout something at someone, then tore off. As he blazed away, another car turned down the street obviously belonging to one of the Narcs we know are working our neighborhood right now. He stopped his car suddenly and got out.

I am often struck by how much of life here in L.A. (and perhaps, in most places) is based on illusion. We are a city driven by it. From plastic surgery and airbrushed images to Disneyland and the film industry, we hunger after illusion. So much so, I think, that sometimes what is real can begin to feel like just one more movie clip passing us by. Here today, forgotten the next.

Two blocks were all that separated the illusion (CSI) and the reality. And I felt troubled by the ways that what goes on here in my neighborhood is either tuned out as “tragic” and “unfortunate”, or consumed like entertainment: “Breaking News, Air 7 is at the scene…stay tuned.” And I am bothered by my own implication: I used to love watching CSI (I’m embarrassed to admit that I was a fan of the Miami one), and I wonder how that helped callous my own heart to the very real wounds and suffering around me? How does crime as entertainment stifle our ability to live as people with outrage over injustice? How does our saturation in illusion choke the small seeds of compassion within us? How does violence as recreation castrate whatever is in us that could give birth to a genuine movement for social change?

Last night when I came to bed, Doug was reading a book that discussed the Sermon on the Mount. We started talking about the Beatitudes, and I made some comment about how I used to be able to recite them in Greek. Of course, immediately after saying that I was rendered completely incapable of remembering the first word (which is a key word, considering it is the word which begins them all). I lay there for quite a while doing everything in my power to trigger my memory. Eventually, I fell asleep, unsuccessful.

At around 1am, there was a gigantic clunk, and Doug rushed to the aid of a stunned little girl who had fallen out of her big-girl bed. As he snuggled up with Mercy and soothed her back to sleep, I picked up Aaron (who was now awake too) and walked with him, trying to shush him back to sleep as well. Mercy was back to sleep in no time, but my charge was a little less compliant.

As I walked in quiet circles in their room, it came to me: “Makarios!”

And I was happy.

Last night we were scheduled to have our monthly block club meeting. Though I had just seen our Senior Lead officer days earlier, I knew that there were a number of updates he planned to give us on some different things going down in our neighborhood right now (things that he did not feel at liberty to shout about from my driveway). I was hurrying to get kids fed and to have Aaron down in time to leave for the 6:30 meeting when the phone rang. It was our good friend who hosts our meetings, and she told me that our meeting was cancelled because the funeral had been held that day for one of the murdered gang members and the post-funeral gathering spot was a few doors down from the house where we meet. The Senior Lead had advised them that it would not be safe to have the squad car parked in front of their house and to have people visibly coming and going.

An hour earlier, my sister had called me to let me know that she also had talked with our Senior Lead earlier that day and she had asked him about the safety of our park right now. “It’s a known hangout for the Rolling 20’s,” he said, looking at her baby. “I wouldn’t go there if I were you.” The park is where Mercy goes with our good friend to play two mornings a week while I work from home. My sister usually has her older son go with them, and she was calling me to say that she did not want him at the park this week.

When it was time for bed, we tucked Mercy in, and I felt the nagging fears I had been struggling with all day. All week there has been so much outside noise at night, and our little girl has struggled to fall asleep in the midst of it. The other night I curled up in her bed with her while people yelled and screamed beneath her window, and I wondered, how does she ingest and interpret the things she is exposed to? I do my best to put a positive spin on as much of it as I can. The constant stream of sirens we often hear are the fire trucks that are “going to help the people”, and she gets happy and excited when she hears them. And the helicopters? They are all going “to the beach”, her favorite place.

But last night as we tucked her blankets around her, the sound of a circling helicopter filled our apartment. He had his searchlight on and he was low (translate, really really loud), and he circled about a block away for almost an hour. I assume that he was covering the area where the post-funeral gathering was happening. And for the first time ever, I was summoned back to Mercy’s room by fearful cries. By then Aaron was awake too and crying, so I picked him up first then made my way to Mercy’s bed. “Hoppercopper. Scared,” she said, and tears filled my eyes. “Where my daddy? I want my daddy. Scared.” I didn’t even try to talk about the beach. I walked out to the kitchen and told Doug to come and hold his little girl.

It would seem that Mercy has met her match…

Meet my Goddaughter, Karenna.

There is a very interesting post at Mark Galli’s blog this week discussing a NY Times piece on violence against women and the need for men to reclaim their role as protectors. I have enjoyed the thoughtful comments along with his original thoughts, and the most recent comment posted was from a young woman (college student) who had recently enrolled in a self-defense course. She says:

“The majority of women do not even try to fight back when they are being assaulted. One of the reasons for this is that they don’t think they are able to, or they do not value their life enough. Assault perpetrators expect a woman to comply with all of their demands. By empowering women with the will (and knowledge) to fight back, much violence against women could be prevented. Too often we see ourselves as victims before we have even become them!”

I have never received any formal self-defense instruction (except for the twenty-minute safety talk we got my freshman year at North Park–go for the eyeballs and the genitals, we were told) so I was intrigued by her suggestion. When I was attacked here in L.A., I remember in that split second deciding whether I would simply surrender to my attacker, or whether I would fight back. There was no weapon visible, and I was in the middle of a street with my best friend (who was attacked simultaneously), and in that moment I felt like I had a reasonable chance of defending myself. I honestly could not have predicted how I would have responded prior to that exact moment: they say that, that you don’t know what you are capable of or inclined to do in that kind of situation until you are confronted by it.

I remember taking the first punch to my jaw. I had never been punched before. I had no idea what being punched would even feel like. It hurt, a lot, but I remember thinking: okay, if that is as bad as it will feel, I think I can take it. A couple of punches, a lot of wrestling, and finally a stopped car and people coming in response to my screams and the ordeal was over. (The neighbors told me that my scream was the single most blood-curdling thing they had ever heard and that I should be in movies–only in L.A….)

It cost me some bruising and sore muscles that lasted a week or so (and emotional scars that linger), but I was thankful that, though my attacker clearly expected me to comply, I did not. Reading the young woman’s comments, and considering the terrifying statistics reported by the Times, made me really consider her suggestion that how women perceive themselves contributes to the mindset of those who would do violence against them. I remember our North Park security officer telling us to walk briskly, make eye contact, and in general carry ourselves with purpose and confidence. Self-confidence and security do much to deter an attacker, he said.

I know that it is always Doug who gets out of our bed in the night when we hear disturbing noises. He is the one to open our bedroom door and go out to face what could be a danger to our family. I see him, at all times, as our protector. Yet there are enough times where I am alone with the kids that I sadly do rehearse the options of violence that we could encounter here and how I would respond. The unfortunate events of a few years ago remind me that I am not, at my core, a victim.