The Margins

“The bread which you do not use is the bread of the hungry; the garment hanging in the wardrobe is the garment of the one who is naked; the shoes you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot; the money you keep locked away is the money of the poor; the acts of charity you do not perform are so many injustices that you commit.”

St. Basil the Great, from “The Call to Justice” by Dorothy Harris

I found myself singing some random kid’s song while I was unloading the dryer one day last week with some line about “up she rises” in it. Mercy was in the dining room and shouted to me:

“No, mommy, it’s a HE.”

“What’s a he?” I asked her, confused.

“The sun. The sun is a HE!”

“How do you know the sun is a he?” I asked, somewhat amused and certainly curious.

“Because it is in the BIBLE, mommy,” she said in that “duh mom” tone.

“Where does it say that in the Bible, Mercy?” I asked, really curious at this point.

“JESUS, mommy. Jesus is a BOY. Jesus is the sun of God.”

In the midst of preparing the “killed bird” as Aaron like to call it, we took time as a family today to reflect on things we are thankful for and draw pictures of them. We then cut out our pictures and hung them with string on a big cut-out tree.

The Haubs are officially thankful for:

-our family
-our van
-trains
-rain
-coffee
-music
-Lauren
-our green house
-Ari
-Jesus dying on the cross
-turkey
-pink dresses
-a brown spider

“Give thanks in all circumstances for this is God’s will for you.”

In the last thirty-six hours I have:

Run over the double stroller with our van.

Snuck into my friends yard on the way to preschool to steal one of her roses because Mercy needed a flower to “give” to Mary this morning at preschool and I did not make it to the store.

Poured chocolate frosting over a Boston Cream Pie, only to realize that I had forgotten to add the powdered sugar.

Thanks for the many, many prayers. It was an amazing night!

Mercy has an unusual name. She knows that both of her brothers have names that belong to people in the Bible. Hers has been a bit more difficult to explain, and while I have tried on more than one occasion, it wasn’t until she watched the Veggie Tales’ movie, Jonah, recently that she really grasped a definition of “mercy”.

They talk in the movie about mercy as giving somebody something that they do not deserve, and they use the phrase “to have mercy on someone”. After watching the movie last week, Mercy was quite proud to explain to me what her name meant, and I have overheard her say on more than one occasion since that she has the “special-ist” name.

The day after she had watched the film, Doug and I were preparing to leave for a four-day trip to Seattle. We were taking Elijah with us, but leaving Mercy and Aaron with two of their favorite people for the long weekend. Aaron was distraught about my leaving, and he repeatedly broke into very genuine tears and pleaded with me not to go. It was a hard day for my little man, and there was little I could do to help him feel better.

One of the kids’ favorite things to do in our apartment is race to the front living room window that opens right as anyone leaves our place so that they can press their face to the window and yell goodbye, over and over again, and wave. So on this day when Aaron was especially fragile, someone left our apartment and Mercy beat Aaron to the spot at the window, and launched into the full goodbye routine. Well, Aaron simply could not endure the disappointment and collapsed in a crying heap on the living room floor because Mercy had beat him to the window.

Doug and I tend to be very careful about not rewarding “fits” as we call them. We always encourage the kids to express their emotions and tell us what frustrates them or makes them mad, but throwing a tantrum does not accomplish much in our house. As we like to say (to ourselves, not to the kiddos), we do not negotiate with terrorists.

Mercy turned and saw her brother throwing his fit on the floor, and I could tell she felt compassion for him. I told her that, while Aaron’s behavior certainly did not merit her giving him a place at the window, she could choose to let him stand in her spot because he was having such a hard day and it would make him feel happy: she could give him what he did not deserve.

Mercy looked at me, then down at her red-faced little brother and took a step back from the open window. “Aaron…you can have the window, Aaron,” she said, gently.

As she moved away and Aaron scrambled to take her place, she looked up at me with those giant blue eyes: “Mommy, I had my name on Aaron.”

It is hard to breathe here right now due to the heavy smoke that fills our air. It is easy to be reminded that countless families are suffering great loss as a result of the fires burning around L.A. as we, who are not affected, cough and choke with them.

I always appreciate the reflections Don Johnson regularly offers on his blog, and it was gut-wrenching to read that in his church alone, ten families have lost everything: homes completely destroyed by the Montecito Fires. I was talking with a friend at church this morning and I remarked on how much that kind of loss for one family would impact a congregation, and the degree of displacement and disorientation that would come with that kind of loss for ten families seems unimaginable.

Please pray for the many people affected, and if you feel led to give, Montecito Covenant Church has a relief fund established for those facing loss, both within their church as well as throughout their community.

A few weeks ago there was a shooting around the corner from our apartment, and in the chaos of the aftermath, one of our youth was nabbed by the police as he ran down Kenwood to go and check on some friends. The officers grabbed him, threw him to the ground, twisted his arm badly enough to hurt his wrist, and kept him in the back of a cruiser for a fair amount of time.

As this friend shared with us about his experience of being detained and trying to speak in his own defense to the officers involved, he told us that the thing he kept repeating to the officers was this: “I am a youth leader at Church of the Redeemer. Please, just go talk to Elliot, or Lauren, or Doug and Erika. Call Pastor Danny. Talk to the church, please. They can vouch for me.”

As unfortunate as this young man’s experience was, it made my heart glad to hear how much stock he placed in his identity with us. As frustrated as I was by the injury to his hand, I was impressed by his sense of belonging to us, and that in his mind that was such a powerful and persuasive thing. That by proclaiming his association with us, he was declaring that he was set apart; different. And in that moment of pain and fear and crisis, we were the ones he expected to come to his aid; to draw near and fight on his behalf.

I also laughed at my own memory of sitting in the back of a police car on Kedzie Avenue in Chicago, muttering mostly to myself at that point: “But I am Senior Par Excellance…”

Last night I taught the second session of our church membership class in our living room after the kids had gone to bed. The seven people gathered heard stories about who we are as a family of faith, and what it means to join this family. We talked about our commitment to proximity to one another as valuable, perhaps necessary, in terms of a common life and witness as well as the practical outworking of our discipleship together.

The exchange between the police and one of our youth the other night is a good example of why this kind of life together matters. For all of us.

My sister has been doing a little kid’s program on Wednesday nights for Mercy and a few other kids. One aspect of the program is bible memory verses, and last week Anna told the kids that if they could recite the memory verse to her the following week, they would get a prize. Well, that is a very great incentive for my little Mercy, and all week she diligently practiced her verse.

Yesterday afternoon, a few hours before she was scheduled to go to Anna’s house, she recited her verse to me one more time. I praised her, and then turned my attention to the baby to feed him his snack.

As I put some food on Elijah’s tray, I saw Mercy position herself in the corner of our living room and press her face against the screen of the open window there:

“GIVE THANKS IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES,” she yelled with her loudest voice. “FOR THIS IS GOD’S WILL FOR YOU.”

She repeated this a few times.

I really wonder what our neighbors were thinking.

I was caught off guard today by my own emotions as I signed my name beneath my voter number in a dingy classroom behind a storefront church. The women who stood outside; the women staffing the table where I signed in; the women whose backs I could see already positioned in their voting booths in front of me; the toddler in the stroller beside my voting station: all African American. And it was like suddenly the weight of Barack Obama’s candidacy hit me like a wave and tears choked my throat as I explained to Aaron what we were doing.

It hit me again tonight as I spoke with our pastor and heard the emotion in his voice: the significance of this election for him, for his parents and grandparents; and watching his toddler son play, unaware of a monumental shift taking place around him.

And watching the speech in Chicago brought tears to me eyes as well. But it wasn’t the faces of Oprah or Jesse that did it but the fact that a young black man I knew since his junior high years stood in that crowd tonight, proud, hopeful, expectant. And all of the things I told him and so many others for so many years about what they could do or be or accomplish suddenly felt a little bit more true.