The Margins

The helicopters and sirens have been going all morning. I am aware of the ways this makes me edgy, in general, with my kids. As my anxiety increases, my patience shortens. I don’t think the solution is to just ignore and pretend there is nothing the matter with the fact that police and emergency vehicles are in a flurry around us. And yet I don’t want that to define who we are.

How does it look to live with the peace of Christ in the midst of chaos or fear?

I saw my brother last weekend, and he told me that thirty-two people had been shot in a single weekend in Chicago. Due to the dramatic number of shootings in such a short amount of time, the shootings received significant media attention. The reality is, had only a handful occurred, it is likely that no one would have heard anything about them. Well, maybe the one involving the AK-47 would have made the news cycle. Maybe.

Last night I checked the Homicide Blog and saw that a young man had been shot and killed a few blocks from here while riding his bike to the store on Friday evening. The shooting took place at 7:45 pm. It was not yet dark. We didn’t hear about this killing, and we live so close. Another death so easily ignored.

Monday night our good friend Jade was here, and we got talking poetry and ended up with a bunch of my poetry books out. We were flipping through and reading aloud some of our favorite authors. In an anthology edited by South African author, Wole Soyinka, titled “Poems of Black Africa”, I read these lines by Gambian poet Lenrie Peters:

Isatou died
When she was only five
And full of pride
Just before she knew
How small a loss
It brought to such a few.

The last line made me cry when I first read it. I am haunted by it still.

I spent Sunday’s worship service helping out in the nursery. At one point, we headed outside to let the kids play on the playground and I stayed in the covered area with Elijah. It was an unusual worship service that focused on prayer, and a few youth had opted to hang out in the back with their skateboards instead of participating. I was sitting there with my baby when I saw a group of three youth come around from the other side of the building carrying skateboards and I realized that they must be in the practice of hopping the fence to skate behind the school.

We didn’t talk much. I mostly enjoyed watching them practice different jumps, and our two boys joined in with what they were doing. The whole skateboarding culture here still cracks me up. It brings back too many of my own memories of junior high.

As I watched them skate, I thought about our friends who joined our church family as a result of meeting us in the park where we met and they slept. Warm coffee and good food shared opened the door to meaningful relationships: with us and with Jesus. I was bummed when I saw that we didn’t have any food this week after the service because I wanted to invite these boys in for something to eat.

There is something good about being a sojourning church. There is something Acts-like in moving about, colliding with people in their everyday pursuits. Mark Galli wrote an interesting post on the importance of a building from his Anglican perspective. He writes:

Every Anglican parish is an icon of Israel, a people with a unique call from God to not wander but to settle down, not to live in exile in strange places, but to gather together on a certain piece of land where Jesus will take on flesh and dwell among them, a place that will become holy.

When I consider Church of the Redeemer, and the community that makes us, it makes sense that we wander: that our “space” speaks of what it means to be aliens; that we sit outside a land of milk and honey and still we choose to worship.

It was ten o’clock before I finally left to do our family’s grocery shopping last night. In general, we try to avoid evening trips to Ralph’s. There have been enough incidents there at night that it is better to just not take the risk. But we needed to shop and this would be my only chance so I went ahead.

As I backed out of our driveway, I noticed two young men on bikes, men I did not recognize as being from our neighborhood. They were circling around at the end of our street, and I had to exit our driveway carefully because they were hard to see and they were swerving all around.

As I pulled out and turned the corner, one of the men stared me down pretty hard. I just kept driving, but suddenly my heart began to race as I realized he was pedaling hard to follow me. One would think that being in a car would feel mostly safe since you can speed up and race off. But on a residential street, there is only so much speed to be had between stop signs. There is a high volume of property crime in our neighborhood here, and confrontational robberies have been on the rise, many involving guns. I of course had no idea what his intentions were but I was scared.

I managed to only barely stop at the first stop sign and then drive fast enough through the next two blocks where thankfully there is not a sign and by the time I made it to Budlong to turn, I knew I had gained enough distance to feel safe. My heart was still pounding when I drove into the parking lot at Ralph’s.

My shopping itself was uneventful surrounded by mostly USC students, most of whom were buying alcohol. It was eleven o’clock when I was finally checking out, and while my groceries were being bagged, an employee realized that a bottle of cleaner I had purchased was leaking. I finished paying but had to stand next to the checkout lines for a bit waiting for someone to retrieve a new bottle of cleaner for me. It was at this point that I noticed a man being ushered by security out of the main part of the store through one of the unused checkout lines.

As he got a few feet away from where I stood, he turned to my checker and asked: “Do you have any small glass pipes…like this?” and he used his hands to show the size. He then turned to another employee and asked the question a bit louder. By now everyone is laughing at him, with my checker leading the way: “Can you believe he just marched up into here and asked that?” she said loudly, laughing hard and shaking her head. Others around her joined in the laughter.

The man seemed non-plussed and turned to me: “Do you have a glass pipe?” he asked, growing more agitated. “You look like you smoke cocaine…” he added hopefully. I was not laughing at him. It was actually just so sad that nothing in me was inclined to laugh. I smiled at him and said, ‘No, I am sorry. I do not.”

His eyes seemed to harden at this point. “You like to drink wine, don’t you. Your eyes look like you like to drink wine.”

“Yes, I like to drink wine,” I told him.

“Would you buy me some?” he said, stepping closer.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“I’m homeless,” he added.

“I’m very sorry about that.”

“Would you drive me to (I couldn’t understand what he said)?”

“No, I’m sorry I can’t do that.”

“Would you give me some money?”

“No.”

At this point his face grew angry and his voice dropped.

“It’s because I’m homeless.”

“No.”

“It’s because I’m black.”

“No.”

We went around and around like this for some time, and he finally started to just tell me that I was acting stupid. “You’re stupid. You’re acting so stupid,” he kept saying.

About this time, I finally got my cleaner and so I turned to walk out the store telling this man that I hoped he had a good night.

As I got to the exit and pushed my heavy cart through the door, I realized that he was hurrying to follow me out. My car was a ways off and there was no one else outside. Realizing that this was not the best scenario, I stopped and pulled my cart back inside just as he got to where I was standing. I have been assaulted once before, and there is a look in a person’s eyes that terrifies me. This man had that look. I pulled out my cell phone to pretend to make a call at this point, and he came right back up to me and stood close. By now I had started to look for security who had been strangely absent since escorting him out of the main part of the store.

“Let me unload your groceries,” he said.

“No thank you,” I replied.

The security guy finally came over and stood next to me. I asked him to walk me to my car. He said that he would but then just stood there. I asked him again in Spanish and he said he would, but again remained standing. He waited until the other man finally left through the front door and motioned for me to go ahead. He did not walk me to my car. He stood in the doorway and watched me the entire time, and I looked over my shoulder continuously as I unloaded my groceries.

I drove home shaking.

I missed our block club meeting on Monday night, so when I saw Lauren the next day I asked her what had been discussed. She gave me the update on police activity over the past few weeks, and it turns out that they did finally catch the two guys who were raping and robbing women on our street. While I felt this huge sense of relief hearing the news, it was also devastating to learn that it was a pair of kids, sixteen-year-old gang members, targeting the moms and grandmas of our neighborhood. My stomach still feels sick over this.

She also shared that there had been a pretty major bust within one of the local gangs with something like twelve or eighteen arrests. That would explain the flurry of police activity we have been seeing during the recent weeks. “Things should be quiet now…at least for a while,” was the word from our Lead Officer. As I write this, a helicopter circles overhead.

And so it goes.

Doug is in the midst of jury duty selection this week, so his schedule has allowed for him to be home in the mornings. Yesterday I had a doctor’s appointment and because he was home I went by myself while he stayed with the kids. When I returned, he had all three kids out front: Elijah on a blanket trying desperately to eat some grass and Mercy and Aaron running gleefully up and down the driveway. I pulled the car in and joined the party out front.

As we were sitting there together, a young girl came walking down our sidewalk. She was holding a plastic container with dollar bills stuffed inside. It was obvious she was selling something or raising money, maybe for her school or her church. We said hello as she passed, and almost surprised she stopped: “Would you like to make a donation for my brother? He was shot four times and is now blind.”

I looked at her, speechless. I have clear memories from my childhood of walking the streets of my neighborhood asking for money: for school walkathons, or because I was selling Girl Scout cookies, or going door to door with my mom on behalf of the Cancer Society. “I am so sorry,” was all I could think to say.

Doug and I rarely have cash on hand, but my purse was sitting next to me having just returned from my trip to the doctor. I fumbled around inside and found a dollar. “Here,” I said awkwardly extending the bill toward her plastic jar which I could now see had a photograph of a boy taped to it.

“Thank you,” she replied with a huge smile. “Have a blessed day,” and she resumed her journey down our street.

As I watched her walk away, I was overwhelmed with how absurd my gift was. A dollar? It felt so insulting, really. And it reminded me how inadequate I so often feel here faced with so many profound needs. Like today when we saw David asking for money on the off-ramp for our exit. Doug opened our stash of beach-quarters (for parking) and filled David’s cup.

I had to memorize the Beatitudes in Greek when I studied Matthew’s gospel exegetically at Fuller (I was pregnant with Mercy at the time and could barely remember my own phone number so this was no small feat). Blessed are those who mourn…those who hunger. These words haunt me as I marvel at how radically different God’s lens is when he looks at his creation; when he sees South Central. And I cannot help but consider how regularly we reject the gospel because we simply do not believe that such crazy things can be true.

I remember it was Easter Sunday our first year living here when we experienced our first homicide on our street. I remember standing on our front porch watching while the area was taped off and and the LAPD worked the scene. I remember watching the coroner’s van arrive to take away the body of the man who had been shot and killed while sitting in his car. I remember what a sober ending it was to our day of celebration.

It has been a tense week here in the neighborhood. The graffiti is shouting war right now, and the heavy presence of police helicopters, sirens, and occasional gunfire confirm it. Early in the week Doug was working hard on a final project for his class at Fuller, and as he sat typing, we watched and listened while a helicopter painted an area a few blocks from us for close to two hours, and every manner of law enforcement vehicle, some we had never seen before, flew down Jefferson with lights and sirens blazing. “We have the area surrounded” a voice declared over a loudspeaker about an hour into the ordeal.

We had the joy of spending the day today with a very dear friend of mine from Chicago. Annabeth was a young girl who lived a few blocks from North Park’s campus and who became like a sister to me during my years there. She witnessed much during her childhood, and we were companions through the loss of one of her best friends, a young man I loved dearly, who was murdered: shot at close range while sitting in his parked car.

Tonight Annabeth and I shared memories of Jamar, and talked about even recently ways that we have grieved his death. Mine was catching a brief movie clip last week on Oprah of a funeral procession winding through a manicured cemetery: alone, I started to weep uncontrollably. For me, it was our arrival at the cemetery to bury Jamar’s body that had pierced me with the finality of his death. After the burial, I remember standing in a sea of an almost surreal green, being held up by Jamar’s best friend and crying louder than I knew was possible. I remember wondering if I would ever catch my breath.

This morning Doug offered an invocation where he shared a story about Aaron. This past week, Aaron was sitting at the dining room table when out of the blue he declared: “I love God…God is a train.” Doug shared how, for Aaron, he wasn’t as much describing God’s being as he was ascribing worth and delight. For Aaron, a train is the most majestic thing he knows. Doug commented that Aaron was doing what we all do when we seek to describe what God is through our always limited understanding.

And then Doug told the story of Mercy accidentally painting a cross on her paper this week, and how horrified she was when I pointed it out. And he contrasted Aaron’s desire to ascribe to God that thing of greatest value and glory that our imaginations can muster with the thing that God chose to ascribe to himself: the cross…something which makes us recoil in disgust.

Tonight I find myself considering the darkness around me, past and present, and desperately clinging to that crucified God. Tonight I find myself longing to touch the hem of that kind of love. Tonight I find my spirit remembering words sung with awe this morning:

Of all the songs sung from the dawn of creation
Some were meant to persist
Of all the bells rung from a thousand steeples
None rings truer than this…

It’s all God’s children singin’
Glory, glory, hallelujah,
He reigns…
He reigns.

And all the powers of darkness
Tremble at what they’ve just heard
Cause all the powers of darkness
Can’t drown out a single word.

On Friday the phone rang and it was a friend up the street who was calling me from the hospital. She just lost her husband a few weeks ago, and her own health is a concern as well. She was at Good Sam being treated for Pneumonia, and she wanted us to know. This meant her boys were home alone. I promised her I would cook dinner for them and bring it over.

I was taking care of Mercy’s best friend all day Friday, and as the dinner hour approached, it was no small amount of chaos in the house as I tried to cook. It ended up that I could only pull off one nice dinner, and that was the dinner that got packed up into Tupperware containers and stacked on the dining room table. My kids got scrambled eggs and some fruit and vegetables.

As Mercy and Aaron gazed longingly at the noodles and muffins that were packed away, Mercy turned to me and asked: “Mommy, I would like to have some of that food.”

“We are sharing this food with some kids whose Mommy is sick and can’t take care of them tonight,” I replied.

“But I want those muffins,” she continued.

“I know. I do too. But we are going to give away all of these muffins. We are being like the little boy John who gave away EVERYTHING he had instead of just giving a little bit like P. Benjamin Methuselah (from the Walt Wangerin re-telling of the story of the Widow’s coin in the Arch book series). God loves it when we give all that we have instead of just giving a little bit.”

Mercy paused and thought about this.

Then she looked up at me with a big smile: “I know, Mommy! God can heal their Mommy and then she can go home and make food for her kids…and then we can eat these muffins.”

Apparently my daughter has a robust theology of healing, especially when blueberry muffins are on the line.

One of the consistent things in our neighborhood is the very steady flow of ice-cream trucks up and down our street. In the six years that I have lived here, I have never bought ice-cream from any of them. Until yesterday

I can’t remember the occasion, but I had told the kids last week that I would set a dollar out and the next ice-cream truck we heard, we could go outside and spend our dollar. Well, we never heard one that day (hard to imagine), but yesterday the kids remembered what I had said and when we heard the familiar music, asked me if we could go. Something truly remarkable had just happened in our home: all three kids took afternoon naps. At the same time. And so I was happy to allow them this special treat.

We ran down our stairs, without shoes, and out our front door but we were too late. The truck had already crossed 30th and I wasn’t going to cross the street barefoot. “Let’s sit on our step and wait to see if there will be another one,” I suggested. The kids were thrilled to run around in the grass and build little twig houses and blow dandelions while we waited. And sure enough, a few minutes later we heard another truck

We met the ice-cream truck (van, actually) on the corner of 30th and Kenwood, and Mercy very quickly pointed out the pink ice-cream cone she wanted. After realizing that just about everything else pictured on the side of the truck cost more than a dollar, I asked the man for the pink ice-cream cone. We walked back to our steps, and the kids giddily sat down to share their treat. They took turns with bites and licks, and their soon-pink faces and big smiles gave me much joy. Doug arrived home from his study session while we were still out front, and he was given the bottom of the cone filled with melted pink to eat.

While we had been out front waiting, we had made friends with two little kids riding scooters on our street. I had not seen them before, and they motioned a few houses south of us when I asked them where they stayed. When we heard the ice-cream truck, they ran home to get some money, but by the time they made it back the truck was gone. I assured them that another one would likely come soon. When it did, I was horrified to see these two kids running after the truck, begging it to stop, while the driver accelerated and drove away. And I could not help but wonder if it was because of the color of their skin.

About the same time we had heard the first truck approaching, a cruiser had come racing up our street. Having just seen a flurry of young men on bikes and on foot, streaming from 30th, I had that moment where I had to decide if we should turn around and go back inside. For whatever reason I decided to keep going and so we walked, barefoot, Elijah dangling from my arms and the two big kids holding hands, to a corner that has been the center of so much violence in our neighborhood, with the black and white cruiser creeping slowly next to us. A second cruiser came from the opposite direction and the two met just north of us on Kenwood, parked their vehicles, and entered the property of one of our neighbors. And we picked out our ice-cream.

Doug made a comment to me the other day about how people make a big deal about where we live but “it’s not like we are saving the world or anything.” My response to him was that while that was true, there is a constant level of fear and tension that we live with that most others (at least those who have a choice) do not. I was especially struck by this on our trip to Denver when I was standing in the backyard of Aunt Kristin’s house where my kids were playing, and I caught myself constantly looking around and looking behind me and I realized: wait, I don’t have to do that here.

It’s hard to quantify: the fear that hovers over little decisions like buying ice-cream. It’s hard to quantify: the ever-present shadow of young men, murdered. It’s hard to quantify: remembering all of the kids who were out playing the night someone was shot, and choosing to walk outside with your own.

My sister was kind enough to take Mercy to the downtown library last week, and Mercy and Aaron are so excited to have new books in the house. Aaron is addicted to a Thomas the Tank Engine storybook collection (he finds the page with the Troublesome Trucks story every time and wants to read it), and Mercy is fascinated by two books about a Knight and some dragons.

My favorite book of the bunch is a book called Billy’s Bucket. In this book, a little boy asks for a bucket for his birthday. The parents think this is weird, but they go ahead and indulge him and they go to the bucket store and let him pick one out. When Billy gets home, he immediately fills his bucket up with water. He starts to describe for his parents all the things he sees inside his bucket: a submarine, a mermaid, sea lions, and a shark. His parents go along with it, laughing at him. Thinking they are funny, his parents ask him if they can borrow the bucket for some work projects around the house. Billy gets very serious and forbids them from ever borrowing it. His parents wink and chuckle and put their son to bed.

The next morning, Billy’s bucket is missing. Dismayed, he walks outside to look and there in the middle of the street, atop cars and light posts, sits an enormous smiling whale. The text reads:

“By the time Billy found his dad, he was too late!

‘I told you not to borrow my bucket,’ said Billy.

It took Billy’s mom and dad six hours, three fire engines, four cranes, and a shoehorn to get the whale back in the bucket. They never ever borrowed Billy’s bucket again.”

I love this story for the artwork, the whimsy, and the way the smug parents get put in their place. But I also love it for the ways it resonates with how I can feel about the Kingdom sometimes. Like I am gazing into something fantastic, beautiful, majestic in scope, hidden inside the ordinary, unseen and unimaginable to most. And the parents’ mockery feels a bit familiar as well when I consider how absurd the things I believe can appear to those around me. Love across cultural divisions? The sacrifice of status, money, advancement? Material simplicity? Peace in South Central?

Scot McKnight posted a letter he recently received from a young future pastor wrestling with what it really meant to preach in the local church today. “What is preaching? Who is it for? How do we learn to do it? How do we judge if we’re doing it well?” were his questions, and Scot opened up the comments for his readers to respond. I started to leave a response a couple of times that day but never finished it, but I think that what I would tell this future pastor is that preaching is a lot like Billy looking inside his bucket and describing the amazing things that he sees.

This past week, a dear friend mailed a sweet package to Mercy, and in it was a tiny envelope bearing my name. Inside was a card with this verse written on the back: “Your road led through the sea…a pathway no one knew was there (Psalm 77:19).” These words brought tears to my eyes as they do even now in writing this. How marvelous and mysterious are the ways of God. Oh Lord, please give me the eyes to see.