bayup 2010 reflections

June 30, 2010
10:50am

I’ve finally settled on an answer to my question.

During the last five years of incarnational living in Oakland – teaching math in the ‘hood and living alongside my students – I often asked myself, “Would my life be different if I were living anywhere else?” The inquiry, I suppose, a rhetorical one.

BAyUP is just 10 days old and all I have done is moved down the street from where I live. It feels like a different world.

It is one, through sheer intentionality, where I am expected to meet my neighbors and expected (even moved) to pray for them and for the city – one where simple living means living simply. It is a six-week world where food and water is precious and each drop and morsel is considered. It is one where community is communal, and everything we have is a gift from God.

This is certainly not the Oakland I had been living in, despite it being just two blocks away. My neighbors were just daily hello-how-are-you-doings. My prayers stopped at me, and simple living lost out to simple entitlements. It was a comfortable Oakland, one without need, and a comfortable me.

The answer, then, is no. My life would not be different if I were living somewhere else. Not because it’s the city that makes my life different, but because I have made the city so.


July 3, 2010
I met Tim at the World Impact Community Breakfast. I saw him eating alone and just decided to sit down and say hello. Tim was hungry. And he knew the food distribution schedules in Oakland so well that he intended to make the most of this free breakfast. It would have to hold him over to the free dinner at the Catholic Church later that evening. I had a vested interest in this free meal conversation, seeking a free Fourth of July barbeque myself!

It was a bit awkward at first, chatting about charity meals and the abundance of it around Oakland, but I just tried to be as hospitable as possible, refilling his coffee and getting him seconds and thirds. We quickly established some rapport, and when another BAyUP student joined us at the table, God was suddenly there.

The conversation quickly moved to deeper pain and brokenness in Tim’s life. (Those students are so gung ho!). Tim is a crack cocaine addict with a desperate desire to be clean but relapses with every hardship of a life of homelessness. He shared about the spiral of events that first sent his life into drug addiction and interjected comments about the loneliness that he felt pervaded his existence. He has tried to commit suicide several times in the past few months, believing that he is unloved and unworthy of receiving love. Tim was starving.

We challenged him to try God and we affirmed him in his worth. We told him about God’s deep love for him and prayed for him to see it in the next few days. I trust God will not disappoint.

Ironically, when Tim left on his way to his next free meal, I could only hope and pray that his hunger be deepened – not for free food and watered down coffee but for the satiating love of God.


July 14, 2010
During a study of the Book of Amos, we took a time of lamentation to process some of the things we had been hearing and learning about God’s views on injustice in the Old Testament. I grabbed a cup of coffee and headed outside to talk a walk.

The moment I exited the gates of Harbor House Ministries, I was overwhelmed with what I saw – an ugly house with an ugly lawn on an ugly street. I looked around and reeled at the ugly neighborhood around me. I felt it in my soul – the ugliness of the world and the things that filled it. As I kept walking I stumbled upon a pile of trampled grapes plastering the concrete sidewalk, rotting. I looked up above me to see just a few remaining beautiful and plump fruits on low hanging branches, awaiting their turn.

Everything was revolting – the feeble human attempts to make beautiful what was inherently ugly, the reality that what we humans have created is so far from the beauty God intended, the sadness of marred perfection.

When I went back to the study, another staff worker said lamentation was a discipline of feeling what God feels. It must be so. God perhaps feel deeply saddened, maybe even repulsed, when he sees the ugliness of what we have done with His world. And sadder still when He witnesses our disregard for it.

* * *

The next day our team went to Allen Temple, a large, largely African-American church in deep East Oakland. As the gospel choir sang and celebrated God, I was nearly moved to tears with the opposite feeling (tears = Fred rarity). I felt an overwhelming sense of joy and relief, starkly contrasted to the disgust and hopelessness I felt the day before. Here I was, with hundreds of others, singing and worshipping and praising God all together, also as God intended. God perhaps feels overwhelmed with love when we pour ourselves out to him in community. He perhaps delights in our understanding that Jesus is restoring what we have made so corrupted. The beauty then, is that there is restoration, and ugliness is but a temporary state.


July 30, 2010
I turned in my monograph today (a master’s thesis) and have completed a second master’s degree. On the drive home I thought about the Kingdom of God, and how we are called to pursue it, and about how, really, there should be nothing more that we vie for. Are the things that I am doing in the day to day really a pursuit of the Kingdom of God? Why is it so easy to get distracted? Why is it so easy to forget that our first love and our chief aim is building God’s kingdom?


* * *
* * *
* * *


On Teaching
During the last day of Trek debrief, Amanda, the BAYUP director, summarized a major theme of the program – that as Jesus is restoring shalom in us, He is restoring it in the world. Our healing and restoration is a part of the world’s healing and restoration. It is exactly the connection between social justice and personal holiness I have been searching for.

As I listened to those words and to people’s testimonies about the summer, I suddenly had clarity about this entire past year. My decision to leave teaching and go back to grad school, and ultimately to staff a BAyUP team, seemed to make sense. I left teaching last year partly to pursue other career opportunities, but in large part because my personal life of faith was crying out for restoration. After four years of teaching in the inner city, I think that my job just became a job to me and I began to deal with the stresses of school in unhealthy ways. I drank a lot, was negative and cynical, and what was supposed to be a ministry of love became devoid of the prayer and holy intention it began with. I got better at teaching, and I attributed it to myself. My students and school improved, and I saw it as the work of my own hands. My ‘ministry’ was not really a ministry at all.

This summer, working at Camp Fire in West Oakland, I felt as if I relived my first year of teaching all over again. My team was essentially in charge of running an entire summer youth program – 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, curriculum and logistics and all. Being a secular organization, much of the work felt very similar to the work I do at my school: the stresses of planning and classroom management, the pains of working with students from such broken backgrounds, even the pleasures of seeing a light sparked or some confidence gained in one of our students. I knew these feelings well.

It was what I did with them that restored me. As Amanda shared, I began to see how the specifics of this summer experience at Camp Fire was what I had been wanting and missing in my teaching career, how it was the mirror of what could be. Whereas I have sought out comfort in alcohol or used complaining to vent as a classroom teacher, I spent the summer instead praying for my students, and praying for our program. I did this with a team that shared a missional heart and was predicated in hope. We prayed each night, and God worked. We prayed again, and God worked. I began to see the power and potential for prayer, in community, for my work and ministry.

As Jesus restores shalom in us, He is restoring it in the world.

Going back to Life Academy this year, I will be such a better teacher. Maybe tests scores won’t improve and maybe the days will be just as tiring and tedious as they were before, but at least my students will have a healthier teacher. They will have a restored one who is not turning to harmful things to cope. They will have one who is more wholly pulling God in to the picture, and one who is praying for them in hope rather than out of reaction. And in this, maybe their shalom shall too be restored.