The Margins

Before moving to Portland, I lived in Spokane, Washington for a brief season, and it was when I was living there that my brother joined our family and I spent many hours in my little Honda Civic driving across the state on weekends to hang out with him and my folks (and to catch as many of his football games and track events as I could). I had a handful of cassette tapes I would listen to while driving, and one of them was a recording of a sermon preached by William Willimon at the annual pastor’s conference for the Covenant Church. I was just coming into my own as a preacher at the time, and listening to him preach was utterly inspiring.

There was one point in particular during the sermon (the text was Sarah’s encounter with God where she laughed at the news that she would bear a son) that brought me to tears at every hearing and the more times I listened to that tape, the more I would choke up at that point (my husband likes to call this my pre-emptive or anticipatory crying–I do the same thing with movies I have seen over and over again). It is a brilliant sermon, and it has always reminded me of the kind of preacher I would like to be.

This morning I drove in with Doug and found a seat in the back of one of the DMin classrooms at Fuller and listened, captivated, while Will Willimon spoke to a group of students about what it means to take seriously the idea that we are called as preachers to invite an encounter with the living God. When I slipped out an hour later and made my way upstairs to Doug’s office, he turned to me with a grin: “Was it all you expected it would be?”

In a word, yes.

This past week I read two things that struck me concerning how we view the homes and space where we live. The first was a review of House Lust, a book earning a fair amount of press for its examination of our nation’s obsession with the size and status of our homes:

Add to this a newly overwhelming lust for space. In 1950, the average American home measured just 938 square feet. By 2005, the average had grown to 2,434 square feet. The size of the putative American dream house expanded even more.

At a convention of the nation’s home builders in 1984, an ideal “New American Home” on display encompassed 1,500 square feet and cost less than $100,000. In 2006, the ideal house was 10,023 square feet, and was priced at more than $10 million. In the interim, Bill Gates of Microsoft built a 66,000-square-foot home near Seattle at an estimated cost of $100 million.

I am quick to say that one of the hard things for me about our life here is the impossibility of purchasing a home here in L.A. And while I sit at a distance through the many conversations my peers have about this and that remodel, this period restoration goal, this great refinancing opportunity, etc., I secretly wish I was in their club (though I certainly don’t envy the many headaches, the total displacement of families during remodel projects, lead and asbestos abatement, etc). I have a friend who has a very crass way of describing the way my generation has sold our soul to Home Depot, and while her words make me laugh I see how much acquiring and restoring homes can consume my peers.

The second piece that caught my eye was written for an internal newsletter for Servant Partners, and it dealt with the ways that crowding is a great stressor for those who live in urban centers, and in particular the slum communities where our staff members make their homes. The author quotes Danielle Speakman (Nothing But a Thief) who writes:

“Imagine your immediate family, who they are, what they are like, how many of you there are. Take all of you, add in your grandparents, and perhaps an aunt and her children. Now move into your bedroom. You all live there. All your possessions are there, you cook there, you sit there, you sleep there. Together…”

It is amazing, the juxtaposition from one world to another; worlds within one world; worlds that offend each other to the core.

The House Lust reviewer continues, quoting the book’s author:

“Unlike the robber baron-era mansions, modern-day megahomes don’t feature dozens of bedrooms or entirely new kinds of rooms — they mostly just take the rooms you’d find in a normal house and make them really, really big.” The challenge of filling up those rooms, he adds, is being met by outsize furnishings like the “extreme ultra king bed” that is 12 feet long and 10 feet wide.

Today was my first day back at work post-maternity leave, and I count it a grace to be in partnership with folks all over the world who have chosen those one room homes over giant rooms and oversized beds. They tell me a truth about life with Christ that is unpopular here in the land of house lust. They remind me of my own material abundance and they challenge me to consider ways to let go of some of that comfort and risk living with less.

“We know from our own lives that we overlook the unhappiness around us. If we were fully aware of all the things the people around us struggle with—in our family, in our office, in our place of work—and if we were fully aware of the cries of the hungry, the degraded, and the suffering in the whole world, it would almost overwhelm us. Therefore we repress it and act as if we didn’t see it. During the Third Reich we closed our eyes and ears to the treatment of Jews and the rumors of concentration camps. For if we had seen and heard something, it would have led to the dangerous duty of protesting. We didn’t want to subject ourselves, though, to these dangerous protests. Therefore, exactly like the priest and the Levite, we made a wide detour around that screaming injustice and acted as though we had not seen it…

It is not because we neither saw it nor knew of it that we neglected to come to the rescue in love. It is exactly the opposite: Because we had no love, we saw nothing and looked for nothing.”

From How to Believe Again by Helmut Thielicke

A few weeks ago I mentioned that the church could do a better job of sharing testimonies that have to do with our relationship with money. I just got a great link from my sister to a little article that ran recently in People Magazine about some friends of ours. Take a look!

I have mentioned here before my son’s fascination with the Goodyear Blimp. He knows that when he hears the echoes of the USC marching band practicing outside, it is going to be a good day for blimp sightings. This morning he came walking into the dining room from the living room, clutching something small in his hand. He walked to the window through which he would normally listen to the band (and watch for the blimp), and he stood there muttering something about “blimp” and “band”. Hearing nothing myself and knowing it is no longer blimp season, so to speak, I walked closer to ask him what he was doing exactly. He kept repeating something about the band and blimp. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted one of Mercy’s little blue ponytail holders resting on the windowsill. Aaron pointed to it and said proudly: “A band for blimp.”

Last night Doug was working on planning the worship service for today while I finished cleaning up the day’s play in the living room when suddenly our apartment was filled with the sound of a helicopter circling overhead. Our living room was shaking, we could hardly hear each other speak, and I went to the front window to see where they were searching. I couldn’t see the helicopter or the light until I was bathed in it.

“What are they looking at?” Doug asked.

“Us.” I answered.

The helicopter continued to hover over our apartment, and the light was shining through our windows when all of a sudden I heard people running right below the window I was looking out, down our driveway to the back of our house. They were shouting and swearing and running very fast. Moments later I could see guys on foot behind them with flashlights: “Drop the gun!” I heard someone screaming, and I realized our apartment was now surrounded by police. I hit the ground, and yelled at Doug to do the same.

“They’re right outside our windows!” I shouted. I crawled closer to Doug and we sat there, huddled in the middle of the living room floor, paralyzed. “Did you lock the back door?” Doug asked me. I had just been finishing laundry and was sure that I had. Our third barrier, a kitchen door that locks between the kitchen and dining room, was open and I told Doug to go and lock it. And then we sat, holding hands, on our floor. I started to cry.

I don’t know how long we sat there. Eventually we could hear mostly police radios and the voices of officers, and we could see their flashlights sweeping all parts of our property. Deciding that the danger had passed, we looked out the front window and saw that they did have a guy in cuffs up against the cruiser, and there were officers walking up and down our driveway, and searching our front and back yards. They took the guy to a different cruiser, and there was a call over the radio and someone said something about “around the corner” and everyone took off.

Maybe fifteen minutes later, there was knocking on our door, and we went, together, to talk to the officer at our door. He wanted to know what we had seen and heard, and he informed us that they had been chasing a gang member with a gun. They had been able to apprehend the guy and it turned out he had dumped the gun around the corner from our house on Raymond.

When he was questioning us, he asked how long we had lived in this apartment. “Six years,” I answered. “Ever had any problems?” he asked? Doug and I both just stood there, looking at him: “Um…yeah. Lots.” I said, wondering if he was ignorant or checking to see if I was. “I mean, here on your property specifically,” he clarified.” “No, not right here.” I answered. He told us he might have to get back in touch later, we thanked him and said goodnight. At some point during our exchange, our landlord drove up into the driveway and stopped when he saw us in the doorway with an officer. He got out of his car to find out what was going on, and I felt better knowing that he was home.

We went back inside and Doug resumed work on his powerpoint and I finished cleaning, but with a distinct heaviness in both our spirits. It was hard to go to bed last night: that tension between wanting to listen for every sound and wanting to stop hearing noise outside long enough at least to fall asleep. Lots of sirens continued throughout the night, and I dreaded my middle of the night feeding with Elijah that would put me out in the living room alone.

Today we are honoring the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. in our worship service. I am at home with the kids, all of us sick, while Doug is there leading. Before all of this happened last night he had asked me: “what should I do for my invocation?” I am wondering what he chose to say to invite our community to enter God’s presence this morning. The words that haven’t left my brain this morning are the title to one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s books: “Why We Can’t Wait”, a theme so poignantly addressed by King in his famous Letter From the Birmingham Jail.

As I think about Doug and me last night, overwhelmed and overcome by fear of gunfire outside our windows, I think of those words: why we can’t wait. As I think of the young man, armed, running through the streets, I think of those words: why we can’t wait. As I think of my kids, sleeping gently in their bedroom while police officers scurry beneath their windows, I think of those words: why we can’t wait. As I think of our church, a church in and for this community, gathered in Jesus name a few blocks from here this morning, I think of those words: why we can’t wait.

Caring for three children under three is challenging. As I told someone the other day, it is a constant cycle of needs: feeding, changing, pottying, playing, dressing, talking, listening, cleaning, the cycle never stops. And it is difficult, no impossible, to not have one child’s needs compete with another’s. I thought it was a lot of work with two. As many people told me, the shift to three is in many ways disproportionately more work.

The last few days have been harder than usual because I have been sick. As I said to my sister, usually when I get sick it’s not like there is someone else to take over: I wistfully remember days when sickness meant calling school or work and spending the necessary time in bed. Motherhood does not have that system, unfortunately, but I was so miserable today that Doug went in late for work and I did call a friend to come over and help. When it was time for her to leave I was faced with a two year old who has just transitioned to a big boy bed who needs a bit more involvement with his bedtime routine as a result, and an infant who had spent a few mommy-less hours already who REALLY needed to be cuddled and fed.

These are the moments that get to me: when attending to one child’s needs must be deferred to deal with another’s. I remember with Mercy, I was able to respond to any and every little cry or fuss. Elijah does not enjoy such privilege. As I have said before, it is not another set of hands I need, it is an entire body.

Lest this sound too negative, let me also say that life with three has been more delightful than I could ever have imagined. I would not change who we are as a family now for anything (not even the Scotch, Kath, though it has helped tremendously this past week).

As I have been thinking through these adjustments in our family dynamic, and in my methods and abilities as a mom, I am struck by some ways this feels similar to certain challenges faced by the church today. There are many places in church life that feel dominated by the consideration of a bunch of individual needs. This is where the “consumer church” language finds it home. Under this mindset, church becomes the place where every fuss and cry is attended to, and if it is not, that church is left in favor of the church down the street or across the city that is better equipped to do so. It is no wonder, then, that pastors can so quickly feel like frazzled failures, unable to be everything to everybody every time. They too don’t need more hands: they too need extra bodies.

The harder, and dare I say less appealing approach, is the cultivation of a community that cares for one another: a community that takes seriously the needs of its members, and chooses to live lives of sacrificial love with one another. This is the piece that relates to my life as a mom right now. I can no longer single-handedly offer what my kids need at all times. Instead, we are learning new ways to cooperate, help one another, and create ways of living together that take into account the diversity of our family. Elijah’s needs differ greatly from Mercy’s, and we are learning how to create systems and a culture as a family that take all of those into account. Would it be easier for me to just cater to each child? Absolutely. Would I feel quite good about myself if I could somehow be all things to all my kids all the time? Of course! The supermom myth is hard to ignore. But there is something profoundly beautiful about seeing my little ones discover mutuality in how they relate to each other and to us.

I know that much has been said about Willow Creek’s Reveal study, and one thing I remember hearing is that Willow’s new strategy is to move people away from being consumers of programs and services and toward becoming “self-feeders” (I think that was their term). I do think there are ways where this conclusion is appropriate. I know that for me it has been immensely valuable, perhaps crucial, that in the last months Mercy and Aaron have developed some new areas of independence. Using the potty, putting on clothes, cleaning up after themselves, etc…these have helped immensely with the arrival of a newborn and the high levels of neediness he brings in particular. But I would argue that the new ways we are learning to do things as a family, the new routines, systems, and habits, matter much more. It is that shift from life is about me to life is about us; that move away from my needs at all cost toward really recognizing the needs of others, even the most fragile and frail in our midst, that is truly transformative.

I had a conversation recently with a good friend who is deciding where he will attend church after leaving the congregation that had been his home for some time. The piece that seemed most crucial for him was the preaching. I am pretty sure that in all the conversations I have had with peers who are transitioning from one faith home to another, this has been the case. In L.A. there are any number of pretty fantastic folks in pulpits throughout the city, and it is not totally surprising that in a city where Britney Spears is the lead story more often than not in the evening news, discussions of churches tend to center on the reputation and performance of the guy in the pulpit. I remember a provocative quotation I posted here a while back that is worth mentioning again:

‘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’.

Bill Kinnon has offered a thoughtful piece on the human desire for authentic community. I think he rightly diagnoses what is too often missing in churches scrambling to respond to a collection of individual preferences and needs. I know that as a mom right now, I am learning how that approach, though appealing, will most certainly be my downfall. And teaching Mercy and Aaron, and eventually Elijah, to be ’self-feeders’, while a piece of the solution, is not the whole. And so I am embracing the harder calling to mold new ways of being together, and create a culture of mutuality, respect, and care for one another.

It is a beautiful thing to see already how Mercy and Aaron’s hearts incline with love toward their baby brother, or extend grace toward their tired mother, or work together to find solutions and take care of each other. It is a precious gift to share together this adventure called family. Perhaps that is part of the struggle that churches face: Mercy and Aaron can’t hop across the street and join another family when I frustrate them or fail them in some way. They are stuck with me. And when Elijah cries too much, or takes too much of my time from them, they can’t just pick a new mom or find a baby-free home to replace theirs. We are forced to find ways to make it work and persevere together.

Collecting food, like collecting toys for tots at Christmas, is the easy part – logistically demanding, perhaps, but fascinating fodder for the promoter and entrepreneur. Devising new methods of distribution, on the other hand, methods that enable the poor to participate in reciprocal exchange, methods that require mutual investment on the part of both donor and recipient, methods that offer honest compensation for honest work – such would be a transformation of historic proportions. The hard part does not lie in the creation of new models – food-buying coops, food for community service, wholesale outlets – such models are there for the researching. The hard part is the re-thinking of a well-entrenched give-away mentality and the restructuring of an established one-way charity system. A hunger-free zone may be possible but a dependency-free zone? Now that is a much bigger challenge.

From Bob Lupton’s Urban Perspective discussing a Kansas City initiative to create America’s first “Hunger-Free Zone” (This quotation is from the January publication which I receive via email–it is not yet posted to the site I linked to here but should be up soon)

For a while now, Doug has taken over the bedtime routing for Mercy and Aaron. Bath, teeth, jammies, clean-up and stories read and told, this is his domain. Last night he was in their room lying in Mercy’s bed with her, telling them one final story in the dark. I have been successfully bumping Elijah’s bedtime earlier and earlier each night, and we are now at the point where I am doing his final soothing while Doug is finishing up with the big kids. Last night I was walking Elijah when I spotted something out of the corner of my eye.

My sleeplessness has decreased enough to where I no longer see dark, shadowy creatures that don’t exist scurrying through the apartment, but at first I was not sure if I had imagined what I saw. I stepped back and saw that no, indeed there was a gigantic spider, legs flailing, scaling the dining room wall. I stood there, paralyzed. It was too high up for me to reach, not that I would have had enough courage to do so. I knew that I needed Doug to help me, but I was terrified to walk out of the room in case the thing dropped and disappeared. The only thing worse than a big scary spider on the wall is when that spider escapes to God knows where in the house.

I can remember one night, I think I was in high school, when I sat in the hallway for more than an hour staking out a spider’s location, making sure not to lose it, until my dad came home. It was only recently that my dad confessed that there were indeed times when the spiders got away, but he would just pretend to catch them so that I could sleep that night.

I finally decided to go to the kids’ room and tell Doug that I needed his help. I rushed back to my post, and as I stood there watching the spider, it suddenly lost its footing and dropped to the floor. I jumped and inhaled so strongly that I made Elijah cry. Thankfully the thing just sat on the floor where it fell, and by the time Doug came out I was able to easily point it out and Doug quickly caught it and took it outside. Doug does not kill spiders. It is amazing that we are married.

After it was all over, I realized that I had felt especially afraid, so much so that I had almost started to cry. And I also realized that that probably had more to do with how stuff feels in the neighborhood right now and less about my actual fear of the spider. My ability to cope with feeling afraid is not very great right now. With the recent shootings, heavy cop presence, and the new threat of a rapist who has attacked twice, the outlet I found to express my anxiety was a stupid spider on the wall.

Whenever people come into our neighborhood, we tell them if they hear gunfire to hit the floor. It is one of those things that sounds like a no-brainer, but it is surprising how non-instinctual it can actually be. I’ll be honest, though, and admit that I do not get down on the floor every time. Some of that is probably because we are in a second floor apartment, but more than that it is a level of confidence in discerning when gunfire is actually close enough to warrant that response.

Last night I hit the floor. Thankfully the kids were sleeping, and Doug and I were sitting up watching a movie in the living room when the shots rang out. They were loud and very close, and I crawled over to my desk and reached for the phone to dial 911. We didn’t hear any car tires squealing and there were no screams, but we did hear the response team come and they did not leave quickly.

I don’t know much about guns, but I know that the kind fired last night was the same as the one that fired the rounds of seemingly endless shots one night this past summer. This sound, this particular gun, scares me a lot. Last night I dreamt about walking down Raymond with Aaron and passing a man holding a large gun. Realizing what I had seen, I crouched down behind a car and held my son close. I woke this morning with the heaviness of that dream still clutching after me.

We spent a good portion of our day today in Santa Monica with our dear friends who just had a baby, and it was one of those days where the miracle and majesty of life just gets in your face and all you can do is marvel at it. Our church is renewing our commitment to the youth of our community in some exciting ways right now, and I am grateful for the chance to be a part of that answer to the echoes of hopelessness heard far too often on our streets.