Structural Violence

Here's a link to a great article from the Tribune by Jamie Kelvin, whose wife, Patricia Evans, was assaulted in 1988 while jogging along Lake Michigan. She is white and her assailant, who was never captured, was African American. Jamie says members of the media who interviewed him expected him to be vengeful and seek "restorative violence". Instead, Jamie moved in the opposite direction and began a quest to understand men who fit the profile of Patricia's attacker. He began planting gardens with residents of the Robert Taylor and Stateway Garden homes and was soon doing lots of justice and advocacy work. Here's a quote from the article.

"There are large violent acts, I have written elsewhere, but no large healing acts. The work of healing is a matter of small acts of attention and care sustained over time. Is this perhaps among the things Dr. King tried to teach us by his insistence on nonviolence in theory and practice? A commitment to nonviolence constantly forces you back to the bedrock realization that structures of inequality and exclusion are enforced by particular blows to particular bodies inflicted by particular hands. And it challenges you to seize the occasions for resisting violence that are all around you. In mysterious ways, more by grace than design, it too has the power to rearrange your molecules—to make you more whole, less afraid, more alive to human possibilities."

The Double Bind

Marcie Curry gave me this book last week with a post it note that said, "You have to read this!" I took a day off yesterday and went to Starved Rock to pray and reflect. I had a great day hiking and praying. At about 2:00 it started to rain so I decided to pick up the book to read for awhile. I read it straight through without putting it down until I finished it at 9:30! I can't really tell you about it without giving it away. I'll just repeat Marcie's words... You have to read this!

Save Our Teens

Our Kids Are Dying

More than at Virginia Tech, more than at Northern Illinois, one by one our boys and girls are dying on the streets, victims of gun violence. Twenty-four Chicago Public School children have been murdered so far this year. Rev. Renaldo Kyles, Interfaith Director for the Chicago Public Schools, spends much of his time going to funerals and consoling the families of the victims.

"My faith gets weak, it gets low. I should be spending more time partnering churches with schools to do more after-school programs, mentoring programs instead of spending my time going to funeral homes," said Kyles. He fears the city has become hardened to the losses.

Over the weekend my daughter, Monica, called me and said, "Mom, you should tune in WGCI. They're talking about the student killings and the kids are calling in to say what they need. They are saying they need safe places to go, to hang out and play basketball and dance."

I'm more motivated than ever to get our Breakthrough FamilyPlex built. That's exactly what the kids in our community need. Safety, activities, educational and job opportunities, sports, music, art and dance lessons. It is a matter of life and death for our kids.

Racism and Chicago Baseball

Here's a link to a Sun Times article about the hottest selling item in Wrigley Field that mocks the Japanese. Very sad!!

"The image feeds not only ugly, arrogant and ignorant Japanese stereotypes, but also the stereotype of the obnoxious, profane, drunken, booing, garbage-throwing Cubs fan."

Justice Revival

The Vineyard Church of Columbus is hosting a Justice Revival with Sojourners.

King's Final Crusade

Thanks to Tawnya for sending me the link to this CNN article about what Taylor Branch, the author of Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire and At Canaan's Edge, says King was planning when he died. He was planning a Poor People's March on Washington DC.

King called his crusade the Poor People's Campaign. He planned to march on Washington with a multiracial army of poor people who would build shantytowns at the Lincoln Memorial -- and paralyze the nation's capital if they had to.

I like the final statement of the article.

"You can't take a person's life who's already given it up."

A Call to the Church

I'm turning out my lights for Earth Hour

If you haven't heard, it's tonight from 8 to 9 PM. Those of us in Chicago are going to turn off our lights in recognition of Earth Hour.

The Fellowship of His Suffering

I wrote a few days ago on this blog about the pursuit of happiness and how living and working among the poor does not necessarily make us happy. Here's an example of that from Shasta Cole, one of Breakthrough's interns. She writes,

i sit here sometimes and i think, what have i gotten myself into? my heart breaks nearly everyday as i see the pain they go through. my heart broke today as i hear the words, i messed up coming from my bright and beautiful 13 year old girl. and my heart breaks as i walk down the street as i go to church on sundays as i see my teenagers struggle to read as i listen to my kids just talk to each other as i watch my 7th grader and her 9th sister walk down the street cuz they dropped out of school...these things, they break my heart. i dont share any of this most of the time because i want to share the good things that happen. because there are so many small improvements i see everyday. but more often than not, i see pain and i see self-destruction. ugh

Click here to read her full blog entry.

Healing for a Broken World

Steve Monsma's book, Healing for a Broken World, is now available. He interviewed me in the accompanying DVD. Here's what Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship had to say about the book.

“Steve Monsma avoids the modern-day tendency to believe that the kingdom of God will arrive on Air Force One. Instead he offers a balanced perspective on how Christians should engage in the political process. His solid biblical grounding, as well as his concrete applications of Christian principles to public policy, provides wise guidance.”

Compassion: The Doorway to Justice

I loved the article by Breakthrough's Housing Coordinator, Paul Luikart, on the Just Life web site about the difference between compassion and justice. He says,

I think compassion is probably the door way to justice. I think performing works of mercy helps people to see the need for justice.

Click here to read the whole article.

Are you too happy?

I was journaling tonight and paged back to the summer of 2003 when I was living in a nice three bedroom house in Andersonville, on the north side of Chicago, with my two daughters. The house had a great deck and an above ground swimming pool in the back yard. It was a beautiful old home on a quiet street with nice shade trees. Andersonville had changed drastically since we moved there in 1988. Clark Street was booming and property values had escalated. There was a garden walk in our neighborhood every summer. The neighborhood was clean and beautiful with many great restaurants within easy walking distance. My girls, who are now 24 and 26, talk often about how much they miss living there.

In my journal I read about how much I was enjoying the summer, daily walks to the lake with my dog Charlie, hot afternoons in the pool with the kids, evenings grilling dinner on the deck. It's a sharp contrast to where I'm living now on the west side of Chicago. I love East Garfield Park and my little apartment, but there are empty lots and boarded up buildings everywhere and lots of trash, broken bottles and cracked sidewalks. It can be depressing. I realized as I read my journal tonight that I was happier living in Andersonville and was beginning to feel sorry for myself, like maybe I had made a bad choice. After all, shouldn't I be happy?

Then I watched the film, When Did I See You Hungry, from the San Damiano Foundation. I rented it from Netflix. It shows the poorest of the world's poor, living in squaller, juxtaposed with statistics and quote after quote from Scripture and from Christians about loving Jesus in the poor. I wept at the sight of a leper, a woman, who looked grotesque from the disease, a disease that isolates people because no one wants to look at them. When asked how she was doing, she said, "Very well, Praise the Lord."

And I'm not happy!!

The producer of the film said, after taking pictures all day in the Payatas garbage dump outside Manila, that he went back to his room and cried.

I don't think we are supposed to seek out suffering, but when we walk with the poor, we do suffer. Life is easier when we avoid them and the communities where they live. I don't think everyone is called to move into a slum, but I think it is important that we let our hearts be broken by the things that break the heart of God.

Walter Brueggemann in his book, The Prophetic Imagination, defines passion as “the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die and to feel”. He says, the world’s economy is “designed to keep people satiated so that they do not notice." Its politics is intended to "block out the cries of the denied ones. Its religion is to be an opiate so that no one discerns misery alive in the heart of God.”

I am certainly not suffering by living in East Garfield Park. I may have felt happier in Andersonville, but here, I am growing in my capacity to care, to suffer, and to feel.

"That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings."
                 - Philippians 3:10
.

“The anger is real;
it is powerful;
and to simply wish it away,
to condemn it without understanding its roots,
only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding
that exists between the races.”

-Barack Obama

Because Jesus Lives

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with men.”

                 -From The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Obama's Speech on Race

I couldn't listen to Obama's speech this morning, so I was happy to find it on YouTube. Beyond the campaign, this is a historic speech that eloquently represents what we experience in our community on a daily basis.

In the Studio with Michael Card

Michael Card and his host, Wayne Shepherd, had me on their radio show again last week. You can download the entire show at this link to the iTunes podcast. It's program #310. Here's the portion in which they interview me.

Sunday's Comin'

Standing on the Verge of a New World Order

My pastor, Daniel Hill, told me about this message by Dr. Cornel West at Saint Sabina Church on Chicago's south side. He challenges us to look at the world and this present time in our history through the lens of the cross. He says we have been living in an ice age of indifference where the cross has been pushed to the side, but the ice is melting and change is coming! It's a great message.

Maya Angelou will be speaking there on Friday, March 28, 2008 at 7:30 PM.

They're home!!

The guys moved into our new interim housing and employment training facility at 402 N. St. Louis last week after four long years of planning and waiting! There were so many times when we hit what seemed to me like insurmountable roadblocks, but God got us through. It's done (except for the parking lot and landscaping) and it's beautiful. Thank you Jesus!! Come by and see it!