I've been thinking alot about my "here and now" and my "later..."
I guess you could say my "now and later..."
Melissa and I were sitting at the kitchen table one evening. She was crocheting a hat (something she does well and often,) and I was in between tasks, waiting for Annie to finish making dinner. I sat next to Melissa and my eye caught a book that had been sitting on our kitchen table for weeks. It's pretty symbolic how long this book stayed unnoticed, right in front of my eyes. Like the book itself, the stories inside of it were accounts of women who have survived awful war and genocide: mass-killings that are both horrible, and horribly ...invisible. like ghosts.
Melissa and I cracked the book open and were immediately struck by how little we know about episodes of genocide that have happened within our time.
With travel in my foresights, I want to know about the struggles of those I may visit, and those I should be remembering in prayer and love. It is hard to know how one should...or can react to great tragedy... but Melissa and I would like to start by reading and researching the histories of groups and peoples who have gone unnoticed...
We'll let you join us as we research...
Monday, May 9, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
hands are for turning places into homes!
Last weekend we were a workin' team! Friday night we helped a local community friend move furniture, blankets, boxes and such into his new apartment. I have to admit I am the master of all things small! (I am sadly less helpful when it comes to the big stuff, but we had lots of young fellas to help out.)
The very next day we worked at an entirely different kind of home-making. This time we ripped delightfully 70's patterned carpet off the floors, pulled panels of plaster off the wall in large, jagged pieces threw the entire mess into a giant ...dumpster bin. 40 ft X 40 ft did they say?
It was really fun to work as a team together. We've had a hard time finding our stride when it comes to our volunteering. This is a small town and sometimes small towns mask their needs. There's less anonymity here than in bigger cities, so the only way to keep your privacy is to wear that mask. Hide things. I think that is one of the reasons it's hard to figure out what our community needs.
But we're here to help. We're here to serve. We're here to pursue honesty in people who may be tempted to "safe face." For this reason, I so appreciate when people ask for help like they did the other weekend. It's hard work finding out what the real needs are, and it saves us a few steps of questioning and uncertainty to be told... "hey...I need your help..."
Anyone have any thoughts as to how we can serve this private community?
The very next day we worked at an entirely different kind of home-making. This time we ripped delightfully 70's patterned carpet off the floors, pulled panels of plaster off the wall in large, jagged pieces threw the entire mess into a giant ...dumpster bin. 40 ft X 40 ft did they say?
It was really fun to work as a team together. We've had a hard time finding our stride when it comes to our volunteering. This is a small town and sometimes small towns mask their needs. There's less anonymity here than in bigger cities, so the only way to keep your privacy is to wear that mask. Hide things. I think that is one of the reasons it's hard to figure out what our community needs.
But we're here to help. We're here to serve. We're here to pursue honesty in people who may be tempted to "safe face." For this reason, I so appreciate when people ask for help like they did the other weekend. It's hard work finding out what the real needs are, and it saves us a few steps of questioning and uncertainty to be told... "hey...I need your help..."
Anyone have any thoughts as to how we can serve this private community?
Monday, March 14, 2011
what are we up to?
Living Acts is a very organic thing, we're finding out. It changes depending on who's living here AND depending on who's visiting here. (We do after all have alot of visitors.) And now we also have a lot of questions. People at the Ohio Mennonite Conference asked "what does Living Acts do?" It's hard to describe what we do at Living Acts. It's easier to talk about what we've done.
We have woken up at 4 in the morning to make egg rolls with our Laotian neighbor, (a woman who graciously helps us use these INCREDIBLE egg-rolls to fund-raise.) Let me tell you: it is so much easier waking up at 4 in the morning when you know you'll be eating the best egg-roll this world has to offer.
We have sorted boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations all over the Save & Serve thrift-store.
We have shared meals with our beloved "millersburg-ers," including Thai meals, Cajun meals, and the worst scratch-brownies I've ever forced down.
We have weekly art-nights where local artists gather to share in-process pieces of visual art, music and poetry and we have also had weekly electric-free nights where we all gather around candles and oil lamps and forgo our usual medias for whatever entertainment we can provide each other in conversation.
We host junior high students from the church, local artists, other locals passionate about community, out-of-town guests, and any other God-crafted individual who may find themselves in conversation with us.
I must be honest in telling you that we are messy people with messy lives and struggles that we can't hide or pretend don't exist. But we are all seeking something more meaningful than "self."
Isn't that what "seekers" are?
We have woken up at 4 in the morning to make egg rolls with our Laotian neighbor, (a woman who graciously helps us use these INCREDIBLE egg-rolls to fund-raise.) Let me tell you: it is so much easier waking up at 4 in the morning when you know you'll be eating the best egg-roll this world has to offer.
We have sorted boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations all over the Save & Serve thrift-store.
We have shared meals with our beloved "millersburg-ers," including Thai meals, Cajun meals, and the worst scratch-brownies I've ever forced down.
We have weekly art-nights where local artists gather to share in-process pieces of visual art, music and poetry and we have also had weekly electric-free nights where we all gather around candles and oil lamps and forgo our usual medias for whatever entertainment we can provide each other in conversation.
We host junior high students from the church, local artists, other locals passionate about community, out-of-town guests, and any other God-crafted individual who may find themselves in conversation with us.
I must be honest in telling you that we are messy people with messy lives and struggles that we can't hide or pretend don't exist. But we are all seeking something more meaningful than "self."
Isn't that what "seekers" are?
Monday, February 28, 2011
mayonaise and sharing
Community is rewarding. Everything to follow should not be without the acknowledgment of the comment i've just made.
Living in community is hard.
Have I said THAT enough yet?
I have had friends who comment that the shared-groceries part of community may challenge more than any other part of shared living. For the most part I disagree with this comment. We do pretty well with sharing food. (Maybe my carnivorous housemates are getting sick of the meatless-ness in our house...but I will naively take their lack of complaints to mean they are doing ok and would agree with me here.) Is it really so hard to share food? All of us grew up sharing foods with our siblings and parents. Is it so different to share with a franken-family?
Our bigger problem is buying enough food rather than buying foods we all like. Perhaps sharing food is easier when there's not enough money to be selective.
Having said that, we are immensely blessed and are continually provided for.
We have little tricks up our sleeve to make this whole grocery thing work.
1.) We are loved! (the broader community has been so giving! Just the other week we received anonymous gift cards to the local grocery store. I can't thank you enough, whoever you are!)
2.) Bent and Dent discount stores. Yes, discount grocery stores are a bit of a gamble and sometimes you'll return home with a fifty-cent find that tastes stale or rancid enough to be a waste of money, but for the most part our discount purchases of past expiration cereals or dented cans of beans have been marvelous and have served us well.
3.) Sam's club. Sam's club is a great place to buy anything in bulk. Well...anything you want in bulk. It wasn't until after I recited our entire grocery list to my housemate while he was at Sam's Club, that it occurred to me we may not have a use for 3 pounds of mayonnaise. Bulk rice is a good thing. Bulk soy milk is a good thing. Bulk mayo.... oops.
I think it's a good thing to need sometimes. It's good for us to need the generosity of others.
I also think it's a good thing to share.
I don't think I need to explain that one too thoroughly. We all agree that sharing is better than not sharing...right?
But how many of us really get the opportunity to share that often? In this day and age we have very individualized lives. We have our own cell phones, our own closets full of clothes we never have to share if we don't want to, and our own rooms often times.
As for me, I love sharing and I love that in this house, we NEED to share. We don't even have to discipline ourselves in that way. It's just a necessity. I may add it's teaching me so much...and I recommend it.
I dare you to share something you've been protective of with someone. Maybe a laptop or a cell phone or an I-pod, or you could start smaller and share your food or your time.
...is time really a smaller thing to share?...
anyway. Thanks for sharing in my thoughts :)
Living in community is hard.
Have I said THAT enough yet?
I have had friends who comment that the shared-groceries part of community may challenge more than any other part of shared living. For the most part I disagree with this comment. We do pretty well with sharing food. (Maybe my carnivorous housemates are getting sick of the meatless-ness in our house...but I will naively take their lack of complaints to mean they are doing ok and would agree with me here.) Is it really so hard to share food? All of us grew up sharing foods with our siblings and parents. Is it so different to share with a franken-family?
Our bigger problem is buying enough food rather than buying foods we all like. Perhaps sharing food is easier when there's not enough money to be selective.
Having said that, we are immensely blessed and are continually provided for.
We have little tricks up our sleeve to make this whole grocery thing work.
1.) We are loved! (the broader community has been so giving! Just the other week we received anonymous gift cards to the local grocery store. I can't thank you enough, whoever you are!)
2.) Bent and Dent discount stores. Yes, discount grocery stores are a bit of a gamble and sometimes you'll return home with a fifty-cent find that tastes stale or rancid enough to be a waste of money, but for the most part our discount purchases of past expiration cereals or dented cans of beans have been marvelous and have served us well.
3.) Sam's club. Sam's club is a great place to buy anything in bulk. Well...anything you want in bulk. It wasn't until after I recited our entire grocery list to my housemate while he was at Sam's Club, that it occurred to me we may not have a use for 3 pounds of mayonnaise. Bulk rice is a good thing. Bulk soy milk is a good thing. Bulk mayo.... oops.
I think it's a good thing to need sometimes. It's good for us to need the generosity of others.
I also think it's a good thing to share.
I don't think I need to explain that one too thoroughly. We all agree that sharing is better than not sharing...right?
But how many of us really get the opportunity to share that often? In this day and age we have very individualized lives. We have our own cell phones, our own closets full of clothes we never have to share if we don't want to, and our own rooms often times.
As for me, I love sharing and I love that in this house, we NEED to share. We don't even have to discipline ourselves in that way. It's just a necessity. I may add it's teaching me so much...and I recommend it.
I dare you to share something you've been protective of with someone. Maybe a laptop or a cell phone or an I-pod, or you could start smaller and share your food or your time.
...is time really a smaller thing to share?...
anyway. Thanks for sharing in my thoughts :)
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
pride
I've been thinking a lot about pride these days.
It's such a sneaky beast: pride.
It effects the way we interact with people and it effects the very stride we carry throughout the day. And it happens to be rolling through my brain in song-form today. The music group "The Avett Brothers" have a lyric that says, "I wanna have pride like my mother has. Not like the kind in the bible that turns you bad," and another musician, Thad Cockrell says "Pride won't get us where we're going."
Pride is worth singing about and it's worth thinking about in the middle of our interactions.
Sometimes Living Acts stirs up a tension between the pride the human side of me innately wants and the humility God is trying to grow in me. If I'm being truly honest, any and all relationships have the tendency to do that from time to time but it's been particularly prevalent in my mind in this house. Maybe it's because I know that the house I live in is part of a broader community and comes along with more accountability than a person might have in another living situation. Maybe it's because I know there is a certain degree of "public-ness" that comes with this experience.
We're being watched. It's something each one of us signed up for by being part of Living Acts. And we really do want to make people proud. We want people to bring us up in conversation when talking to others about what the church is doing and we want our mothers to smile as they explain to the relatives on Christmas day that we're living "in community". And we want people to leave our house feeling as though we've really met their needs in some way. We want to make people proud and we want to make ourselves proud.
pride.
Similarly, I don't want to be called out when I leave my laundry in the laundry room for a whole week or when I've become obnoxious in asking "how the job-hunt is going?". I want to go about believing that I'm never frustrating and that I make people feel fabulously inspired all of the time. I want to believe that I'm a capable adult with all my stuff sorted out.
Pride. It's a sneaky little thing that makes me slow to admit when I need to move my laundry and quick to fear that I'm failing someone.
It feels exhausting sometimes but the simple fact is, as Christians, we really are called to a great amount of good. We are called to be patient and fair and productive and to excel in all we do for others. And we're called to be held accountable to these standards by the other believers around us. It's tough.
But here's the redemptive part.
I am a sinner.
You are a sinner.
I will mess up.
You will mess up.
I wrote in my journal yesterday as I reflected on Patrick's sermon:
"When I was a kid, i was frightened by any suggestion or reminder that I 'might' be sinning. ...'might?' There is no might. Yes, I am sinning. Of course I am. But there is freedom and authenticity in coming to God with my sin as a confessed sinner and not a sinner in denial. I'm not afraid of it anymore because it's not mine to solve. It's mine to bring to He who will solve or resolve it."
I sin.
the sooner I can humble myself and accept that truth, the sooner I can freely accept the humility that will make me an eager student of all God's lessons.
pride won't get us where we're going
It's such a sneaky beast: pride.
It effects the way we interact with people and it effects the very stride we carry throughout the day. And it happens to be rolling through my brain in song-form today. The music group "The Avett Brothers" have a lyric that says, "I wanna have pride like my mother has. Not like the kind in the bible that turns you bad," and another musician, Thad Cockrell says "Pride won't get us where we're going."
Pride is worth singing about and it's worth thinking about in the middle of our interactions.
Sometimes Living Acts stirs up a tension between the pride the human side of me innately wants and the humility God is trying to grow in me. If I'm being truly honest, any and all relationships have the tendency to do that from time to time but it's been particularly prevalent in my mind in this house. Maybe it's because I know that the house I live in is part of a broader community and comes along with more accountability than a person might have in another living situation. Maybe it's because I know there is a certain degree of "public-ness" that comes with this experience.
We're being watched. It's something each one of us signed up for by being part of Living Acts. And we really do want to make people proud. We want people to bring us up in conversation when talking to others about what the church is doing and we want our mothers to smile as they explain to the relatives on Christmas day that we're living "in community". And we want people to leave our house feeling as though we've really met their needs in some way. We want to make people proud and we want to make ourselves proud.
pride.
Similarly, I don't want to be called out when I leave my laundry in the laundry room for a whole week or when I've become obnoxious in asking "how the job-hunt is going?". I want to go about believing that I'm never frustrating and that I make people feel fabulously inspired all of the time. I want to believe that I'm a capable adult with all my stuff sorted out.
Pride. It's a sneaky little thing that makes me slow to admit when I need to move my laundry and quick to fear that I'm failing someone.
It feels exhausting sometimes but the simple fact is, as Christians, we really are called to a great amount of good. We are called to be patient and fair and productive and to excel in all we do for others. And we're called to be held accountable to these standards by the other believers around us. It's tough.
But here's the redemptive part.
I am a sinner.
You are a sinner.
I will mess up.
You will mess up.
I wrote in my journal yesterday as I reflected on Patrick's sermon:
"When I was a kid, i was frightened by any suggestion or reminder that I 'might' be sinning. ...'might?' There is no might. Yes, I am sinning. Of course I am. But there is freedom and authenticity in coming to God with my sin as a confessed sinner and not a sinner in denial. I'm not afraid of it anymore because it's not mine to solve. It's mine to bring to He who will solve or resolve it."
I sin.
the sooner I can humble myself and accept that truth, the sooner I can freely accept the humility that will make me an eager student of all God's lessons.
pride won't get us where we're going
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Living Acts: new beginnings!
Wow everyone.
I don't even know where to begin.
My house-mates are great.
Yesterday we were all settled into the coziness of the living room in front of the television as though it was a fireplace. The television is a pretty poor-quality piece of equipment so it gets neglected often, but every now and then it has a bit of a fireplace effect, and we all gather 'round it to warm ourselves and fall deeper and deeper into the comfort of a living room.
However, it was my dish night. So, I interrupted our group entertainment and hermit-ed myself away in the kitchen.
i barely had time to fill the sink with hot sudz before I realized that the tv was off and both of the boys were sitting at the kitchen table. Zack dried the dishes as I washed them and Kevin organized the pile of dishes into something less terrifying. But more importantly, they laughed and joked.
My fellas joined me in the kitchen on my dish night, solely to keep me company.
Now, there are many things that we do as Living Acts members. We try new ways of praying, we invite new folks into our homes, we seek Jesus in the clutter of our week...and we support one another. I think the latter is one of the most beautiful things about an intentional community. We rally.
When I write a new banjo song, there are always ears to hear it.
When I want to escape the complexity of loving others in a quick jog in the graveyard, there are feet to join me.
When I want to laugh, there are jokes being told.
When I want to seek God, there are others seeking too.
This house has a warmth no fire or television can cast off.
I don't even know where to begin.
My house-mates are great.
Yesterday we were all settled into the coziness of the living room in front of the television as though it was a fireplace. The television is a pretty poor-quality piece of equipment so it gets neglected often, but every now and then it has a bit of a fireplace effect, and we all gather 'round it to warm ourselves and fall deeper and deeper into the comfort of a living room.
However, it was my dish night. So, I interrupted our group entertainment and hermit-ed myself away in the kitchen.
i barely had time to fill the sink with hot sudz before I realized that the tv was off and both of the boys were sitting at the kitchen table. Zack dried the dishes as I washed them and Kevin organized the pile of dishes into something less terrifying. But more importantly, they laughed and joked.
My fellas joined me in the kitchen on my dish night, solely to keep me company.
Now, there are many things that we do as Living Acts members. We try new ways of praying, we invite new folks into our homes, we seek Jesus in the clutter of our week...and we support one another. I think the latter is one of the most beautiful things about an intentional community. We rally.
When I write a new banjo song, there are always ears to hear it.
When I want to escape the complexity of loving others in a quick jog in the graveyard, there are feet to join me.
When I want to laugh, there are jokes being told.
When I want to seek God, there are others seeking too.
This house has a warmth no fire or television can cast off.
Monday, August 2, 2010
new things
Wow, 5 months goes by fast! The past few weeks have been full of reminders that this beginning chapter is drawing to an end. Rachel and Zack have been packing up their things and moving what they can into the house they've purchased just at the top of the hill. Rachel and I spent the majority of Friday sifting through kitchen gadgets to decide what belonged tothe house and what didn't.
There's nothing like moving to remind one how inconvenient it is to own things. I don't know how long it will last, but I have a new-found goal to own as few things as possible for as long as possible!
Remind me that if you see me out shopping.
The other reminder of transition was the return of our soon-to-be house-mate Zach Hazlett! he just returned from Africa 2 weeks ago, but yesterday was the first that I saw of him. We brought him over here to the house to show him his different bedroom options. We decided he's pretty much too tall for the attic, so as the shortest person in the house, I get to keep my beloved attic bedroom.
I have to admit...it will be strange and different to have Annie gone from the room I've enjoyed sharing with her. Not to mention it will be strange having her gone from my weekly schedule. I'm a little anxious about it, but I know that God knows what He's doing here.
Sometimes I wonder if this will feel more like an actual intentional community to Keven once it's not so saturated with Yoder family members. In fact, I'm actually pretty excited about our little team of three, and how it may wake things up a bit for comfort levels and personalities to be a bit more...unknown. Sometimes you forget to be a team when you're already a family I suppose.
Pray for us as we transition. I think this year ahead will be an exciting one.
There's nothing like moving to remind one how inconvenient it is to own things. I don't know how long it will last, but I have a new-found goal to own as few things as possible for as long as possible!
Remind me that if you see me out shopping.
The other reminder of transition was the return of our soon-to-be house-mate Zach Hazlett! he just returned from Africa 2 weeks ago, but yesterday was the first that I saw of him. We brought him over here to the house to show him his different bedroom options. We decided he's pretty much too tall for the attic, so as the shortest person in the house, I get to keep my beloved attic bedroom.
I have to admit...it will be strange and different to have Annie gone from the room I've enjoyed sharing with her. Not to mention it will be strange having her gone from my weekly schedule. I'm a little anxious about it, but I know that God knows what He's doing here.
Sometimes I wonder if this will feel more like an actual intentional community to Keven once it's not so saturated with Yoder family members. In fact, I'm actually pretty excited about our little team of three, and how it may wake things up a bit for comfort levels and personalities to be a bit more...unknown. Sometimes you forget to be a team when you're already a family I suppose.
Pray for us as we transition. I think this year ahead will be an exciting one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
