Shawty

Today I attended my second memorial service of 2012...which sucks. But this one was at beautiful feet in respect of a homeless man, Billy who would eat with us regularly.  Billy was almost half my size and as he would come up to get his tray the community service ladies would always get excited and shriek "Hey Shawty" and I remember worrying that it would offend him.  Well it turns out that, that was his name.

Shawty passed in the night a couple of weeks ago as he froze to death.  This messes with me to be in such an affluent country of excess, how is it even possible for a man down the road to get so cold that his body stops? Shawty was 38 and died unaware that his daughter is carrying his grandchild as she was yet to track him down.

I didn't know what to expect from a Beautiful Feet Memorial Service, even just what to wear... but I kind of hoped to be able to tell about how beautiful it was with the homeless coming together as a family.  And I guess it was beautiful... the picked flowers one woman lay by his ashes, the homeless man that recited poems he had written and the fond stories shared.  But it was also horrible, the man who knelt before the table with his ashes on but messed up the cloth on it as he drunkenly struggled to stand back up and the many homeless knelt before the alter knowing that without change, their lives are headed in the same direction.  Holly talked afterwards of the brokenness of it all and how it is right that we come before the Lord broken, but it seems like these people are leaving broken too.  Christ brings wholeness and new life and I pray his renewal over the lives of these people.

In a way I too am homeless in America, puzzling over the hospitality, love and comfort I have constantly received in sobering contrast to the life of my neighbor who died on the streets because he had nowhere to stay.

'A Heart for Freedom,' Chai Ling.

This week I had been reading the biography of Chai Ling who found herself leading the student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1986.  She talks of growing up in the Chinese culture and how she developed a passion for democracy, the horrors of the Massacre and then her life as China's most wanted woman and her escape to America. So its a crazy, crazy story, softened...or sometimes hardened by the heart of a woman who longed for acceptance, her families pride (despite them wishing for a first born son) and the love of the men in her life who made commitments then abandoned her.

But the hardest chapters were the last three as she talks about her heart and work for the end of china's one child policy and the abortions involved in that.  This paragraph hit me hard...

"When you consider that 86 percent of all Chinese women have had at least one abortion and 52 percent have had two or more, and when more than 40 percent of American women will have an abortion by the age of forty-five, it's clear that hundreds of millions of women are victims of abortion, along with their babies."

I may have just been naive but I had no idea the extent to which this is happening, and I almost panicked trying to think back to when I might have carelessly talked about the evil of abortion in the company of somebody who has had and will continue to (for whatever reason) carry that burden.  I think abortion is an evil, but an evil of a broken society not of a woman who has been failed by society into thinking she cannot or doesn't want to bring her child into the world. I know of a very few girls who have had abortions but the statistics show that I am in the company of far more that I don't know about, so I wish to be so bold as to challenge that we need to get our hearts right on this issue and always speak on the subject as if we were talking to somebody who had just told us they have had an abortion.  I am pro-life but I am realising that there is no 'safe' Sunday School room for my unrestrained opinions and passions of the heart. "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

Update on my world... mainly for those I suck at keeping in touch with back home (sorry about that ;))

So here's a brief update on what life looks like right now.
Firstly my Mum is coming in less than 2 weeks to see me.  She is staying for three weeks and right now that is pretty much 50% of what occupies my mind.  I am SO excited to see her.  She will be coming on the New Orleans Mission trip with me which I am excited for, it is her first mission trip and I'm so blessed to be there with her.  I pretty much signed us up for everything together but what I'm excited for most is the Vacation Bible School we will be doing for children in the evenings.  It's cool to have to plan and take some responsibility in advance for the trip rather than just showing up and seeing where I can fit in as I always have before.  So spring break is the next big thing on my calender.  Then we have Chris then Rach coming over so our homesick hearts will be getting a lot of love over the next couple of months!

Beautiful is great but crazy as ever. Hol and I often find ourselves stopping and laughing at the situations we find ourselves in.  The other day we found out that one of Holly's (MANY) pursuers is supposedly wanted for murder and today we asked one of our friends in the kitchen about his girlfriend and it turns out he has five haha. But our friends there are definitely some of the funniest I know and most of them have stories that will warm and break your heart, which is good for me.  My heart could always do with being a little warmer and a little more broken.

Last weekend we helped out at the Disciple Now weekend at a church nearby that our friend Tyler Downing is the Youth Pastor at.  That was a really cool experience, staying in the house of a couple we didn't know and leading and teaching girls we didn't know and yet it was a weekend of laughter and growth and crazy games and appreciation of the body of the church. One really cool thing we did was a 'prayer journey' that was set up so for over an hour each of the leaders rotated through a number of rooms to be at different prayer stations.  A lot of it was to do with just slowing down and being still and letting the Lord talk to you.  It was pretty crazy for me how I can think I am taking 'quiet times' and I can think I am slowing down to be with the Lord but its not until ALL distractions were removed that I realised that my quiet times aren't so quiet after all and there are definitely some things that the Lord was desperate to tell me if I would only stop long enough to listen.

Then this weekend Delainey is home for her birthday celebrations and Priscilla is staying over so it's quality sister time ahead.  I have many many stories that I should have blogged on earlier but I will have to slowly catch up or I will get into the habit of infrequent blogging splurges.