Love Him

I remember a conversation I had with John on the sidewalk in Alaska, after he was feeling kind of guilty for the way he had to put a drunk guy in his place when he unwittingly disrespected John’s personal space. “You know, we’re sitting here on this piece of pavement for days, not moving, not trying to control anything, and even now… even here… we struggle with how to treat people the way Jesus would. Humanity doesn’t even know how to act right when we are operating on the most basic levels of human interaction! What business do we have building things like governments and corporations!?”

That simple conversation has stuck with me throughout my travels for the last six months and through almost 30 states and countless cities, during hundreds of meetings and through all of my efforts to coexist with people who are so different, and so much the same…

I recently watched a TED talk by another guy named Jon, who lives in what’s called an ‘intentional community’ in Tampa, FL. He tells a story about a lawn mower and reminds us that people are more valuable than things. It struck a chord with me specifically at the time, because Rob’s dog Indy had been consistently chewing up a lot of the things that held a tremendous sentimental value to me.

Like the day that Indy tore the fabric off the roof of the truck while we were out having dinner, the same roof where I had carefully written the names of the state and the date in sharpie marker as I crossed each state line in 2010. I can admit that I was feeling wounded. When I walked up to the truck and saw the damage that night in December, I quietly went back into my mother’s house and up the stairs to my old bedroom that had been converted to a spare. I swallowed the understanding that the words written on the roof of my truck only mattered to me… that what mattered to everyone else was that I was okay. After about an hour, Rob walked into the room with head drooped low, and I imagined how he must feel. He knew that his dog had taken something from me that couldn’t be replaced, and he knew he couldn’t fix it. So I told Rob then, as Indy jumped up on my old bed and buried his face in the blankets, that his dog was much more important to me than the roof. I told him that Indy was going to be his best friend for at least the next ten years of his life, and that someday Indy would be to him what Zuzu is to me. I told him that friendship is priceless, and if we had to pay for it with my roof, that it was worth it.

I needed to repeat that out loud when we found Gregory’s Bible with the cover chewed off a few weeks ago. (I remember picking that Bible up off the pavement when we were robbed in Detroit and praising God, saying that if nothing else, I still had that Bible. On that awful night, I prized that Bible more than any other thing that I owned.) So when Indy got a hold of it and chewed the crap out of it, I whirled around to face Rob with the Bible in my hand and raised it above my head in anger. My eyes seemed to turn red, I felt blinded by rage. I’m not sure what stopped me from beating Indy with the Bible, especially as Rob realized what I was about to do and muttered, “you can,” as though it would be justice. But somehow, as my Bible thumping fist was being lowered toward the little creature beneath me, I whirled back to face the truck and set the Bible on the passenger seat. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The dog matters more. Rob matters more.

There’s nothing easy about community. The more I learn about it, the more I wish people would be honest about the things that they have struggled with in an effort to build community, and even to reconcile their own families. I often wonder why everyone expends so much energy attempting to convince people that we are so great and so good at this stuff, when in reality we are all so broken, and we make just as many mistakes as the people we are so critical of. I read a sign posted on the side of a church building recently as we drove through Savannah that said “everything must be difficult before it can become easy” and I think I repeated it twice that day as we worked out what community meant to us.

The three of us are realizing out here on the road that we are building up toward some sort of transient, mobile intentional community. We’ve all chosen to live together, work together, and do life together. It made sense for me and Shane to do this as husband and wife, and at first I thought we were just building a family. That’s hard enough, if you don’t know. But when Rob joined us, and other people began expressing their interest in short term missions with the project, I realized that we weren’t just building a family. Rob isn’t our adult child, and we aren’t his parents. We can’t just set a list of rules and expect him to follow them with perfect precision. He’s not just our ‘volunteer’ and he’s not just a third wheel. He’s a member of our family, but we aren’t raising him. We’re all broken, and unable to lead each other. We must follow Christ, and let Him lead us all.

It’s interesting because I happened to meet the guy from the TED talk through a BBQ at my friend Ben’s house in Tampa. Jon was there, and I was excited to hear what he had to say about what he does. As he spoke, he used a lot of words that are foreign to me, like ‘micro churches’. But without realizing it, he provided a new framework with which I could consider the next steps of this project. When our truck rolled into Tampa, I had an idea for something new.

I called it ‘base camp’ for some reason. I’m not really sure where I got the term, but my friend Joseph said it sounds like something that the Rainbow kids would do. I laughed because I love the Rainbow kids, and joked that I must have some rainbow blood. But I’ve never heard them use the term before, and it just seemed to manifest out of thin air in the way that all good ideas have a tendency to do. It’s so simple that you might think it’s not even worth mentioning, but it’s not just this simple idea that I want to draw attention to. It’s the journey and the lessons that came with it.

The idea was to simply park the truck in the ‘bad neighborhood’ for a few days, create new opportunities to give, and watch what happened. The park next to us was full of people gathered at each end. I had picked this spot for the trucks based on intuition, but the decision was confirmed less than twenty minutes after we parked when an incredibly drunk man stumbled down the sidewalk holding a bottle in a brown paper bag. He was weaving back and forth as he walked between the grass and the fence line until he finally had to sit, or kind of fall, against the fence for a moment and gather his sense of balance. I loved that man so completely from the moment I saw him, and even more when Rob offered him a bottle of water and he told us he needed a beer. I loved him for being who he is… like a neon sign telling us to stay and collect our sense of balance.

I know a guy named Tim who told me that his mission was to “do life in the darkness, in order to be the light,” and I’ve believed in that concept since the day he said the words in reference to the rough neighborhood where he had chosen to Do Life. The world considers these neighborhoods to be untouchable places and reacts to them with consuming fear, neglect and criticism, but I’m not convinced that poverty itself is a dark place. In fact the opposite is closer to the truth… poverty is the Kingdom playground; the place where we discover and demonstrate the good news. So maybe we just parked there because we wanted to serve and meet the needs of people, and the most obvious needs are in poverty. Or at least that’s what we thought…

I think the first clue that it went deeper than that was when we met Jordan. He was walking past the truck the second morning that we were parked there, and stopped to say hello. We had been standing outside with the tailgates down, as our way of keeping the front door open, so to speak, and I mentioned to him that if he knew anyone who would be in need of a pair of socks or some basic stuff, that we would be there for a couple days. He told us he could use a pair himself, and within a few minutes he told us a story about some trouble he was having with his family. He had accidently broke a dish the day before, and that night his family tore into him, calling him every name in the book. They told him he was stupid and worthless, and as he put it “they called me everything but a Child of God.”

My ears pricked up at that statement. I wasn’t sure if it was just a figure of speech, but I could tell by the way Jordan was talking that the things his family had said to him had really hurt his feelings. I leaned in a little closer and he continued. “I know I made a mistake. It was an accident. Seems like a silly thing to get so mean about. I can take it, but it’s what they don’t know that hurts my feelings. They don’t know that I’m more than meets the eye. I’m more than just what you see. I have a good heart, and a soul. I’m a spirit, and I have a light in me. A light that some people just can’t see. Some people think that the world is just made up of physical things… they don’t realize that there is this whole other element that is way more important, way more powerful. It’s the good. It’s the Love that lives in me. That’s who I am… it hurts me that my family doesn’t see me through those eyes.”

I was momentarily speechless. “I’m not perfect,” he continued. “I do lots of things that maybe I shouldn’t do. I smoke cigarettes, I curse, whatever… but there’s more to me than all that stuff. Like you guys just gave me a clean pair of socks. That might just be nothing to you, maybe, but it’s something to me. Like, that’s a real kindness that you just showed me. More than my family showed me lately. There’s more going on than just this stuff that you can see with your eyes. Maybe someday we’ll all be able to see the light that lives on the inside when we do things like this…” he said as he shook his fist full of clean socks.

I honestly didn’t know what to say. He said “Thanks, I love you guys,” with a smile before he started walking up the street. That kid is only 23 years old. But he already knows…

I started thinking about what it means for this project to be a community, and then also what it means to let our community spill out into the neighborhood around us. I decided to make lunch.

There was a crowd of people gathered on the west end of the park the day we met Jordan, talking and laughing loudly even at this lunchtime hour. As I carefully made a half a dozen sandwiches, using mayo and mustard packets that were given to us by our friend Jeff and the cheese and lunchmeat I just received from my cousin in Jacksonville, a very tall man with a scruffy white beard rolled up on his bicycle. “Okay y’all. Everyone’s over there talkin, so I figured I would be the brave soul who comes over here to ask what y’all are doing out here and what ya want, or what you’re here to do. I ain’t scared. I’m the first one here.”

His name was Freddie, and after a sandwich and a bottle of water he had all sorts of things to say. We were laughing so hard we had tears in our eyes as he cracked jokes and teased his friends. Pretty soon other people were joining us at the tailgate, curious about why we were all so happy and what was so funny. We were giving away clothing and food and all sorts of random things, as we usually do when we have a giveaway, but this time it felt different. Maybe it was because we were committed to this block of pavement. Committed to Loving this neighborhood, this park, and this new family. Freddie talked us into a promise that we would make a pancake breakfast the following morning at 8am before he waved goodbye and rode his bike up the street. I’m so glad he did.

Around the same time, Nathanial rode up on a beautiful bike and began our friendship with a skeptical attitude. “Are you guys part of those church kids that come out here and just want to take pictures of us and preach?” he asked us.

Ouch. We were only holding the camera because Freddie had asked to have a picture taken with me and Shane. “Dude, we’re living here for the next couple days,” Rob explained as he pulled another bin of women’s clothing out of the truck for Sandra to sort through. “We just want to help.”

That afternoon, Rob and I walked around the neighborhood to get to know the people we were living with. Thanks to a 5 dollar donation from a kid in Mobile AL, we were able to get 5 large coffees from the McDonalds that was six blocks up the street (also the nearest public restroom) and we decided that we would give it away before we made it back to the truck. When we paid for the coffee, the tax was 35 cents, and I only had the quarter that I found on the floor in the bathroom. A guy in the line next to us with long dreadlocks and sunglasses gave me the dime that we needed to cover the rest. He didn’t have to, I had already told the girl behind the counter to just give us 4 coffees, but this guy just reached out his hand to the girl and handed her a dime. That little coin meant that we were able to love somebody else with a cup of coffee on the walk back, and that guy didn’t even know it.

After conversations with James about Larry and his monopoly on car lots, and with Shorty about the best parts of Savannah and how business was going at the auto repair shop, and with Mr. Brown about the history of the block and the tragedy of abandoned and burned down buildings, and with Valentine about love and marriage… the last cup of coffee went to Pete, who was part of the group along the west side of the park. He waived us down from the other side of the 7 foot fence to ask us what the heck we had been doing parked on this block for two days. By the time we explained, he had broken down the dynamics of drug use in this park, where not to go, the habits of the police and the party scene up the street. His words echoed in my head as I walked away… “I like you type of folk! Travelers. You’re open minded! Good people.” I wondered at what we had done other than smile a lot and nod and tell him that we just wanted to spread some love in the neighborhood and share our stuff.

While Rob and I had walked around giving away coffee, Shane had been walking around the park with a black trash bag and gloves, picking up all the pieces of trash that littered the sidewalk and the bushes around the fence. Rob and I had found a pair of awesome shoes and a kid’s backpack inside a black plastic bag in the backyard of one of the 9 abandoned buildings on our block. We put them in the back of the truck with the rest of our stuff to share or give away. That evening, Nathanial was riding back by on his beautiful bike and he had a huge smile on his face. He stopped at the corner and extended his hand to Rob. “I just want to thank you guys for what you’re doing for our community. Really. It’s a huge blessing!”

I felt a happy confusion. What was happening here? We weren’t really doing anything… or were we?

As we walked further up the street, meeting more people, giving more hugs, giving the socks from our own feet and finding beautiful photos in abandoned alleyways, something happened…

I fell in love.

I remember the names of every single person that I met in the three days that we spent next to the park on 38^th street. I thought my heart was going to explode when a crowd gathered under the gazebo during our pancake breakfast and Tanner told me that they were “so glad” to have us there. When I looked through my photos, I saw Love on every single one of them. I memorized every step in the pavement, every stray cat or dog, every boarded up window, every stroke of graffiti. I couldn’t help it. I walked up the street with my arms wide open saying to the blue sky that “I just love you so much, and I feel so loved.”

I think experiences like this have something to do with our eyes, and the amount of light that we can let in at once. You probably remember science class and the way that the eyeball works like a camera lens. I think Jordan described it in spiritual terms, and that those principles of understanding are just as real as the world we can touch. When I can look at someone through the eyes of faith and grace, through recognition of my own brokenness, and gratitude for the grace that liberated me to serve, I can find God there… and Love Him.

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