more things....

We spent a full week in Richmond on a mission trip. Our group was WONDERFUL and they got a long with one another and worked hard. It was nice to be in Richmond joining others who are doing good work: Tabernacle Baptist Church with Refugee ministry and BTSR with building repair and campus yard work. I had a good time with the kids that we took. I missed Greg and John Tyson.

The week that we were at home was also the week of July 4th, Matthew's b'day, and our first Living Room Lecture: Art, Faith, and Politics. I was disappointed with the turn out for the living room lectures. I had left 30 fliers to be passed out in the neighborhood, but no one passed them out while we were away, so I passed them out on the day before the lecture, but it was too late. I ran around like crazy cleaning up the house and setting it up and passing out fliers and preparing food on the day of the lectures. The summer missionaries took a day off that day, so a lot of the work was left for me to do last minute. We only had 3 guests, none of which were neighobrs. bummer. Our next lecture is July 24th: Music and Faith.

We celebrated Matthew's b'day with good food and friends. We watched the neighbor's crazy fireworks. Jackson and Sarah came for the party. I was glad to spend that time with them. Matthew got a bone from the Kelletts.

Krista and I left early for Unidiversity. I felt like I needed to be there early to set up since I was appointed the "co-director" and all. We got things ready and got settled in. The week went pretty well. I felt the whole week like I was trying really hard to do well so that folks would think I was good at being the director. I'm not so sure I accomplished the goal, but it was a good week nonetheless. At the end of the week, I was really tired.

No rest for the weary, though. Instead of riding home with our Hyaets group, I drove by myself to Raleigh where I picked up John Tyson from the Jarrells. Then, I went to Mom's house (nice nice guest room) and we made 100 pimento cheese sandwiches for Hollis' bridal shower. The next day, I got up early (THanks, John Tyson) and went to church with Mom. Then, we packed things up and headed to the shower. We helped set up and prepared my "work station" where I put together the hostess gifts for Hollis (scrap book and sea shell shadow box). The party was very nice and I think Hollis left feeling loved. That's what we were aiming for. Betsy took care of John Tyson while I was at the shower, so when it was done, we went to Betsy's house to visit and pick up the boy. I drove home, stopped at Cracker Barrell to rent a book on tape because I was so sleepy, and crashed when I got to my bed.

Monday, everyone was tired, but somehow kids managed to pry their way into our house anyway. We were all aggravated at each other and the kids due to the lack of rest, so I closed up the house midday during John Tyson's nap and took a nap myself. The summer missionaries retreated to the other house for some quiet. I took care of answering the door and phones when necessary. On Monday night, the Polaskis met us for dinner and we took Kelia so that they could meet her. They are helping to sponsor her while she's at Meredith.

By the way, Kelia got her letter from Meredith. After all the money she has earned through scholarships and such, she will only owe $5,000 a year! Amazing! Now it is up to us to help raise the rest. We can do it!

Today is Anna's b'day and because the girls are so tired and un-ready to be working, I've decided to give them a break by being on duty for them the rest of the week. Tomorrow, we're going to Union county to visit at my grandmother's house and see some friends at Passport Wingate. Then we'll come back for dinner and devos and I'll go to work at Student Orientation at UNCC in the evening.

Thursday, I'll take kids to the gym.

Friday, we've got a community meal.

I'm wondering when folks will give me a chance to rest, but for now I feel like I've got enough energy to make it through...although I don't feel like I have enough energy to clean my room (what a mess!).


Adam and Tracy come home soon. I've kept up with them via email and blog. It will be interesting to see how they adapt when they get home. Do not read when hungry! :) www.turnerjarrell.blogspot.com

We will go to the beach on July 25th. I'm looking forward to getting away. When we come back, though, there'll be 5 groups coming to do work and hear about Hyaets between July 31st and August 8th. Whoa!

Good news, we do not have to go to trail. Our neighbor made a plea.

Things I haven't said that I've been meaning to

One of our neighbors is in jail for murder. We've been commanded by the DA to be a part of the trial. We have nothing to say. No real evidence. No real character witness information. The trial is supposed to take place during our already planned vacation. ugh. There's a kids in the neighborhood who supposedly is upset with us because we "snitched on him" about this and apparently according to other neighbors, the guy is ready to retaliate against us. We don't even know this guy. Scary. Upsetting. Frustrating. Not a great addition to our summer.

At the 5k race in May, Samia said something that really hit home. We were in Dilworth and we were walking to the park when she said, "Man! This place is pretty! It makes me want to never mess anything up. Don't you think so too, Miss Helms?"

Dr. Jones came to our house today to read to the children. I was honored that he accepted the invitation to come. I tried my best to get the house ready for his arrival, but it was hard to make it spotless because of all the wear and tear lately. (we could really use a thorough cleaning right now). He came, children showed up, and he read some stories. The kids seemed really interested and did a good job of sitting still and listening. We fed the kids lunch and Dr. Jones headed on out.
It meant something to me that he came and invested a part of himself in us, even if it was only for an hour. What he did meant something. Not to mention that when he came, it was almost as if the Pope was coming to town the way we all acted. We were on our best behavior for the pastor.

Matthew's birthday party is on Saturday. This is the one party I throw per year. (I used to throw one in December, but I quit) Every year, I get all excited and make good food and set up the yard for the big event thinking that this'll be a great party and that everyone will have a great time and be so happy to be here. And then the party begins and it is sort of dull. I don't have the right music to play. I don't have entertaining things for my guests to do. And so folks just sit around, eat, drink, talk, and eventually leave and I end up feeling like I did a poor job as a party hostess. This year, I'm going to set up the food and the yard and I'm not going to care as much if folks don't have a good time. I've decided it is not up to me whether folks feel entertained or not. (I am going to supply a few games and some bug spray, though.)

I had a really good conversation with Dr. Galindo from BTSR when I was up there last week. He encouraged me to keep on writing. (I had stopped) I'm going to try. Just wait till this summer is over!

Can I stand this long thick head of hair any longer? I'm trying to grow it out to donate, but it is getting on my last nerve. We'll see.

That's it for now.

Sponsored by Hyaets, the Living Room Lecture series gives us all a chance to gather and discuss important topics related to faith. We hope this will be a good opportunity for neighbors, theologians, lay people, church members, and others to come together and share in dialogue with one another about matters of faith.

This summer, Hyaets presents the first of many Living Room Lectures to come with a three part Art Series: ***
1) Faith and Politics: Join us as we watch The Ordinary Radicals, a documentary following the "Jesus for President" tour led by Shane Claiborne and sponsored by The Simple Way. Tentative date: June 30th, 6:30pm, 2910 Parkway Ave*
2) Music and Faith: Dr. Tony McNeil will lead us in singing and discussion on The Lord's Supper and Congregational Singing. Communion will be served. 7:30pm, July 17th, 2910 Parkway Ave.
3) Photography and Spirituality: Maggie Farrington will lead us in a discussion on "capturing the light" through photography on August 21st at 7:00pm at 2904 Tuckaseegee Rd. On the following Saturday (August 22), Hyaets wil host a practical seminar on the mechanics and artistry of photography. (Bring your camera on Saturday and be ready to go out into the neighborhood for some photojournalism practice!)

All Living Room Lectures are free and are open to the public. (Ages 15+ preferred) If you'd like, you may bring a donation to Hyaets and/or refreshments to share with others.

*Stay tuned for any date and time changes.
***Stay tuned upcoming lectures in the fall.

We hope you'll join us for all three lectures!

Blogs I love...

These are just a few:

http://dollarstorecrafts.com/
http://junkcamp.blogspot.com/
http://www.recyclethis.co.uk/
http://shuttersisters.com/
http://www.thingstodotoday.org/today
http://ethanandaubrey.blogspot.com/ (this is my college roomate's blog)
http://ethanandaubrey.blogspot.com/ (one of my hilarious old youth group kids from Richmond)
http://jademccullyphotography.blogspot.com/ (beautiful photography)
http://kellyraeroberts.blogspot.com/
http://turnerjarrell.blogspot.com/ (my brother and sister in law on a South American Adventure)

Hello blog readers,
Hyaets recently had the joy of welcoming our two summer missionaries to Hyaets, but within 24 hours of arriving one of them has had to make the decision to go home (due to outside circumstances). Needless to say, the absence of one summer missionary leaves us in the lurch.

I anticipate that a summer without help will be unbearable and that I will likely be found in the back corner of a dark closet at the end of the summer if we do not find some committed and consistent helpers to join us regularly during the summer.

That said, do you know anyone? An older youth? A college student? A young single? Who could lend us a hand with some of our daily kids' activities/administrative duties/ household chores?

We are optimistically looking for someone who would fit well within our community and who might be willing to live with us for the summer and serve with us. If we can't find someone to be residential, we'll settle for someone who will come over regularly.

We are prepared to pay a small stipend to whomever might help us in this way.

I've got a detailed job description. So, if you think someone might be interested, I'll send the description to your email address.

If you know of anyone who might be willing to help step in and fill the void, it would be beyond appreciated.

Thanks for thinking it over with me,
Helms

In response to The Well April 2009...

Michael-
I enjoyed your article [in The Well, April 2009]. I, too have been convicted lately of gaps between my rhetoric and my daily life. As we transition from the "just beginning our family/life/marriage stage" to the "been at this for a while and have our kids and lifestyle set stage", I think my responsibility to settle into a life for my family that is based on compassion, inclusivity, and sustainablility increases. Instead of starting those habits and ways of being now, though, I simply talk about doing it.
What good is joining and advocating for a CSA if I don't plant my own garden and teach my kids to eat what they grow?
What good is walking in an earth day parade if I always go shopping when my kids are in preschool?
What good is longing for community if I don't inivte people into my home weekly?
What good is thinking about inequality and the segregation of classes in our society if I don't even try public school with my own sons?
What good is recycling if I can't keep buying the crap I kinda sorta want a little with no restraint?
What good is teaching my kids to care for others without an eye for status if they never interact with any non-upper class people?

I don't want to wind up 50 and still be thinking I want to be more Christ-like in my social consciousness and activism...and instead be playing tennis and goiong to lunch everyday. With little changes in patterns and daily choices, our lives and experiential reality will drastically alter in the long run.
so thanks for your thoughts.
Brandi

Holy Weaknesses

In the most recent issue of Conspire Magazine, Will Braun writes an article about "success" and living faithfully. I found the article to be insightful and inspiring and I hope you will too. I would love for you to read it and share your opinion on it. I'd especially like to hear from those of my friends who are oppressed or live in the margins as they might have a fresh perspective. Please read and comment if you get a chance. Thanks

Holy Weakness
Resurrection and the limits of success
By Will Braun

If Jesus has toppled the oppressive government of his time, I would be much clearer about my calling. If he had launched a campaign of nonviolent direct action with the poor or brought about land reform or ushered in universal health care, o protected a pristine wilderness, or made poverty history, I wouldn’t be so conflicted about how to live out my faith.
But he didn’t. Jesus’ resurrection was a victory of cosmic proportions, but it didn’t seem to achieve any outcomes of the sort listed above. Most notably, although many people of Jesus’ time wanted him to overthrow the overbearing Roman occupation, the risen lord did not use his authoritative victory as a chance to appear to the rulers to depose, lobby, or convert them.
This troubles me because I’m realizing that I’ve devoted much of my life to attaining precisely that which Jesus’ life didn’t. For fifteen years, I’ve tried to be the most savvy, effective, and competent social-justice advocate I can be—in the fields of indigenous struggles, environmentalism, and justice-oriented magazine editing.
For a long time, I’ve found ways to sidestep the discrepancy between my approach and Jesus’ approach, but now I’m at the point where it has me in a vocational tail spin, wondering whether to change direction significantly. I still believe the Jesus’ resurrection means something for poor and suffering people—other than just that they get pie in the sky—but it doesn’t seem to mean that their earthly battles will end in success.
The crossroad I am at hinges partially on the notion of success. While “Success” seems ill-suited to Jesus’ mission, I fear it has been all too well-suited to mine, I worry that I have unwittingly followed the standard success narrative of our times—a script in which a person has a dream or vision, follows the dream with singular commitment, believes in his or her self (perhaps in God as well), doesn’t give up, achieves victory of some sort (or “makes a difference”). The moral of the story tends to be: Destiny is yours. Try hard enough and you’ll succeed.
Though Christians regularly squeeze Jesus into this script, I’m nagged by a strong sense that the resurrection is not a success story. I feel I need to untangle the resurrection story from the prevailing success narrative in order to understand it, and my calling, more deeply.
When I consider what has brought me to this point, three stories come to mind. They seem to have chosen me rather than me choosing them. They draw me to a profoundly counterintuitive and unsuccessful understanding of the resurrection and what it means for injustice and suffering.
While living in France, Jean Vanier met two men who lived in an institution for developmentally disabled people. He was moved. He sensed their primal cry for love and belonging, and in their cry, he sensed the call of God. So, in the prime of his life, he invited the men to move into his home. Leaving a promising academic career behind, this son of the former Governor General of Canada began tenting to the daily needs of these men. It was a backward thing to do in many ways, but what Vanier slowly discovered was the ability of these men to bring him, through shared daily life, to a deep experience of tenderness, love, unity, and God.
“The whole Christian mystery is revealed to us through the weak and powerless, the little ones,” he wrote in a set of unpublished retreat notes in 1986, “The resurrection touches the depths of the desolation of Jesus.”
Vanier called the humble household of three L’Arche (French for “the ark”). For decades later, there are many L’Arche homes around the world. In these homes, people with developmental disabilities (“core members”) and those who assist them share life together. But the point is not to make L’Arche sound grandiose. It centers around wounded and weak people. “L’Arche is something very small,” Vanier says, “Little people in little communities…We don’t do great things at L’Arche.”
Vanier writes about “descending” from a world of accomplishment to be with core members who have no hope of achieving success in life no mater how much they believe in their dreams. And in those communities, outside the realm of success, the wonder of God emerges.
Similarly, Henri Nouwen descended to L’Arche and there discovered the core of faith. An academic and widely read Christian author, he worked his way up to a teaching post at Harvard. But while there, he wrote: “Something inside was telling me that my success was putting my soul in danger.” So he left, and spent the next ten years of his life at L’Arche community north of Toronto, Canada, where he died in 1996 at age 64.
Nouwen left Harvard to feed and wash people who had no idea what Harvard was and who had no use for the skills he had worked decades to obtain. He quit something he was very good at to do something he was admittedly poor at. And though his time at L’Arche was not easy, it became a rich gift to him. In a book called Adam: God’s Beloved, Nouwen tells of his relationship with Adam, a core member who could not speak or move without assistance. With great tenderness Nouwen explains how Adam taught him “the language of the heart” and revealed to him the meaning of spiritual poverty and what it means to be the beloved of God.
Nouwen veered off the path of success into a different realm altogether, “I still get invitations to speak all over the world," Nouwen wrote while at L’Arche, “But I have to say no. My Community says it’s more important to…spend an evening with someone who can’t speak or do anything than to speak to thousands of people.”
The third story that keeps popping up in my mind is of the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of Jesus, two Catholic monastic orders. These monks and nuns imitate the life of Jesus as a common laborer in Nazareth before his public ministry began. They call it the hidden life. They live humble lives, usually in small households in unknown, marginalized places. They might work in a factory or sweep floors at a school, but they don’t start schools or hospitals like some other orders. Their role is a role of obscurity.
Carlo Carretto left Italy in the 1950’s to join the Little Brothers in North Africa. In his book, Letters from the Desert, he tells of traveling through the desert by camel and coming across a group of laborers “wielding the shovel and pick all day in the heat and dust” to repair a road. “I passed up the line of workmen scattered on the track, replying to their greetings and offering the liters of water in my gherba for their thirst. At a certain point, among the mouths approaching the gherba to drink, I saw a smile break out which I shall never forget. Poor, ragged, sweating, dirty: it was Brother Paul, a Little Brother who had chosen that detail in which to live out is Calvary; to be a kind of leaven there….I knew Brother Paul well, because we had been novices together. A Parisian engineer, he had been working on the Reganna atomic bomb when he heard the Lord’s call. He left everything and became a Little Brother…Nobody knew he was an engineer. He was a poor man like the others.”
While these stories are not about social justice per se, they suggest that the victory of Christ is discovered when we exit the realm of success and move toward powerlessness.
In his landmark book, The Politics of Jesus, Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder says our calling is not to reach for the levers of control by which we can “Get a hold on the course of history and move it in the right direction.” Jesus did not “make sure that things would turn out right,” he says. Instead, Christ chose servant hood over dominion, meekness over effectiveness. The relationship of cause and effect has thus been replaced with cross and resurrection. Yoder suggests that we Christians must be liberated from “the compulsiveness of the vision of ourselves as the guardians of history” in order that we might “receive again the gift of being able to see ourselves as participants in the loving nature of God as revealed in Christ.”
I know what it is to compulsively reach for levers that influence decision makers. And when I bring to mind the relentless sense or urgency, strain, and “savior complex” that come with this reaching and striving, I feel drawn to the liberating possibility of a different approach.
God’s approach leads to victory. Yoder says, but the victory is different than what we would logically expect. Commentators suggest that many of the people waving palm branches as Jesus made his “triumphal” entry into the great city of Jerusalem would have desperately wanted him to lead a political revolution. Their expectations quickly provide entirely misguided. I wince at that story because I fear that I , along with many Christian world-changer types, are those people cheering Jesus on, expecting him to do things that are entirely outside his nature.
Jesus’ next act was the cleansing of the Temple, an act that social justice-minded Christians like to cite as an inspiring story of someone boldly confronting the powers. Yoder says this comparison is “partially valid,” but suggests this use of the story breaks down when “one asks whether Jesus’ ‘demonstration’ was a ‘success’.”
And so we end up somewhere very different than the success narrative. Instead of straining to take destiny by the horns and attain success, we have a descent to a point of powerlessness and then the emergence into the realm where God’s gentle, liberating, ultimate victory is realized. In the wake of holy weakness a new song is sung. One narrative is about strength, effectiveness, competence, ascent, influence, control, and striving. The other is about weakness, meekness, holy failure, liberation, descent, obscurity, and letting go.
What then might this all mean in the life of someone who feels called to address suffering and injustice?
I’m thinking hard these days about what a noneffective approach might look like. I expect it might mean less busyness (less striving) and more time to be present to suffering people. It might mean more time with small people and less with influential people. It might mean taking on fewer projects and turning down speaking gigs (which I have already found myself doing). It might mean not pushing my ideas a forcefully—whether with colleagues or the public. It might mean fretting less when events of history do not unfold as I wish, and focusing more on those things that live on in a plane not reported by the media. It might mean less resisting. I might mean doing nonsensical things. It might mean veering off the path of success.
As I begin experimenting with the descent, I find courage in believing that Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is an authoritative validation of the path he took. It signifies for me that the path of descent to powerlessness and meekness is not---as Vanier, Nouwen, Adam, and Brother Paul discovered---a dead end.

Will Braun is a father, part-time social-justice advocate, and part time editor of Geez magazine. He lives in Winnipeg, Canada and can be reached at will@geezmagazine.org