The Stranger

December 26 dawns bright, clear, and cold, or at least what passes in Southern California for “cold:” about 50 degrees. Southwood is quiet; many of the residents are indoors after a late Christmas Day, or are off with relatives. Angela’s out of town, so Bree and I end up sitting at the table with Shoshanna, Marisol, and Rebecca, coloring and talking about Christmas. The girls talk about Barbies, sweaters, necklaces, and other gifts. Rebecca suddenly remembers some some fruit-scented markers she received, and gets up to go get them.

A rather incongruous burst of death metal music at high volume draws everyone’s attention to the upper level of the motel, where a very thin young man, shirtless in the cold and apparently in the middle of a major housecleaning session, is hanging what appears to be sets of mini-blinds off the second story railing.

“Be careful,” Marisol says to Rebecca, who has paused to look up at the source of the music. “I will,” Rebecca replies, heading for her apartment.

“We should tell them,” Shoshanna says to Marisol, who nods soberly. She turns to Bree and me and says, cocking her head toward the young man, “He’s a pedophile.”

“He molests kids,” Shoshanna says.

“Oh. How do you know that?” Bree asks.

“My dad told me, and their moms told them,” Marisol said.

“He just moved in,” Shoshanna explains. “He’s on parole. They have to tell everyone who lives here. It’s the law.”

Rebecca arrives back with her markers and passes them out, offering each of us our choice of scents. We color in silence for a few minutes.

“So,” I say, “you guys know never to go anywhere alone with that guy, and to never go in his apartment, right?”

Marisol nods. “We have a buddy system,” Rebecca says. “And our parents are walking us everywhere.”

Shoshanna looks up from her picture. “We don’t even walk on the walkway by his apartment. We walk all the way around. We don't even go upstairs.”

“My dad is trying to make him move out,” Marisol says. “He’s talking to the manager, and the parents made a committee.”

“OK,” I say. “That’s really good.”

For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to talk to the parents about signing their kids up for the Cherish Our Children program. The program is a response to child exploitation and abuse, and involves different levels of education and intervention. The simplest level, the one we’re trying to start at Southwood, involves parents signing up their kids to be matched to an adult who will never meet them but who will commit to pray for the assigned child by name on a daily basis. We had some success with a few of the Southwood parents, and I’m glad they’re getting prayers. Besides that, and the kids having some education and safety plans, I know there’s not much else that can be done. Parolees have to be paroled somewhere, and most of the motels take them. Poor kids have to live somewhere, and unfortunately, for many of them motels are the only option.

The man finally re-hangs his blinds, locks up his apartment, and walks out of the parking lot and down the street. It’s time to pack up, and we watch the kids go back to their homes. Bree and I head off to get something for lunch; on the way, I think about how much I worried about something happening to her when she was small. We had some hard times while she was growing up, but we never had to live in a place where having her exposed to real danger was an inevitability. I thank God for that, and resolve to remember to pray more often for all the kids at Southwood. And for the stranger.

Pat Robertson, Haiti, and God's Real Response to Tragedy

In the wake of the terrible earthquake in Haiti, Christians from all over the world are responding with prayer, donations to aid groups, and deep empathy for the people of Haiti.

Shortly after the tragedy occurred, television personality Pat Robertson, speaking as a Christian minister, made some very irresponsible and inaccurate statements implying that the earthquake in Haiti occurred due to some kind of curse or punishment from God for "a pact with the Devil" supposedly made during the slave rebellion that led to Haiti's establishment as an independent country.

As a Christian, and from the standpoint of someone who works with human tragedy on a consistent basis, let me be very clear: Pat Roberson is wrong. God does not save up human failings like petty and evil treasures, lying in wait until he can strike people in vengeance. Rather, God is a God of love who suffers with humanity and chose to sacrifice himself for the sins of humanity.

God loves mercy and justice; God defends and protects the weak. This message is clearly stated throughout the entire Bible, but nowhere is it more eloquently expressed than in the words and life of Jesus.

I hope that anyone who reads the Southwood story will get the true meaning of the gospel, and will understand that the story of God's interaction with the world is a message of hope for all who despair, not a message of condemnation.

If you are hurting, you should know that God loves you and suffers with you.

If you are not in need, and especially if you're a follower of Christ, please remember that our love for him should be shown in love for others. Do whatever you can to show God's love to someone else, as often as you can, whether they are struggling for food, clothing, and shelter in your community, or reeling from a disaster half a world away.

Gaudete

In the ancient church, Advent was a season of penance, much like Lent. People were encouraged to use the weeks of Advent to prepare themselves to receive Christ. But on Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, the time of rejoicing began, and “gaudete” actually means, “rejoice.” The third Saturday in December brought rejoicing to Southwood with the Christmas party for the children. Santa came, there was music and caroling, cookies, and a bounce house. Lots of fun for everyone. Take a look:

Christ in the world is good news for the poor. Rejoice!

Jolly Old St. Nicholas

The second Sunday of Advent falls on December 6 this year; this is also the feast day of St. Nicholas. For any non-liturgical readers, a little background: Nicholas was the bishop of Myra, located in what is now Turkey, back in the fourth century. Nicholas is traditionally considered the patron saint of (among other groups) the poor, children, and pawnbrokers, all familiar entities at Southwood—toss in a few parolees and some slightly imperfect Lutherans and you pretty much have the whole Southwood community. He was known for leaving gifts for children and needy families, and was largely deep undercover until his generosity was discovered, and then celebrated, and he was finally made a saint by the Catholic Church. Our modern legends of Santa Claus are partially modeled after the legends about St. Nicholas, even to the point of referring to Santa Claus as St. Nicholas. At Southwood, St. Nick is our kind of guy.

Our Advent activities at Southwood usually involve a more liturgically based view of Advent as a time of preparation to receive Christ, the Savior, anew, to prepare our hearts to celebrate this most amazing gift from God. Today, Angela reads a story about a town preparing for Christmas, but without candy. At the end of the story, a candy shop is opened, and its first shipment contains boxes of candy canes. The candy shop owner shares the candy with the villagers, using the candy cane to illustrate important points of the Gospels: the cane can remind us of a shepherd’s crook, and that Jesus is our Good Shepherd; the cane can also be inverted to make a “J” shape, for “Jesus;” the white can remind us of his holiness, and the red stripes can remind us of the wounds by which we are healed.

Listening to the story, I’m appreciative of the way the symbolism is worked into a story rather than being presented as factual history; this is symbolism that has occurred to people after the features of the candy cane were developed for other, more mundane reasons. I think St. Nick (both of them) would approve.

Angela and Sandie, her daughter, have a craft prepared that will remind the kids of the day’s story. Sandie is very accomplished at all kinds of bead crafts, and has devised a candy cane craft using pipe cleaners and red and white plastic beads. Angela has brought candy canes for each child as an extra treat, so they crunch away in sticky happiness as they thread beads onto pipe cleaners.



While the kids crunch and craft, Angela and I discuss a problem that’s come up in the last couple of days.

In the spirit of St. Nicholas, a Christmas party is being planned for the kids at Southwood. All four of the Lutheran churches in the collective will have volunteers there; there will be cookies, a bounce house, and a visit from Santa. The children are on gift lists at other area churches, and there were preliminary plans to have Santa give out the gifts, but we learned late in the week that the churches handling the gifts want to give them out in a different way. What will Santa give out? You can't have a Santa that doesn't give you anything, especially not for these kids.

Taking our inspiration from St. Nicholas, we settle on stockings. Angela thinks candy and some healthy foods like crackers, fresh fruit, and nuts would be better than a lot of small toys or party favors, so we agree on just a few small toys, oranges and apples, cheese and cracker snacks, packages of nuts, candy, and maybe some fancy pencils to show off at school. We have a little money in the church’s Social Justice account, and there’s a local craft store with a wicked sale on velveteen stockings. We’re set.

We check off our Southwood Christmas list: gospel shared, check; residents ministered to, check; bounce house, check; cookies, check; Santa’s gift problem solved, check.

Later, Angela is in a crowded craft store, arms laden with several dozen stockings, when another customer asks her if she’s making things for a holiday craft sale. Angela tells her what the stockings are for, and about the kids at Southwood. “I’ve heard of the motel kids,” the woman says. “I’ve never been able to figure out what I could do about them.” She’s a quick study, though; she hands Angela ten dollars before she leaves the store, then turns around at her car, comes back into the store, and hands Angela ten dollars more.

St. Nick (both of them) would approve.

Jesus, Our Brother

It’s the beginning of Advent, and liturgical Christians begin their seasonal devotions to prepare themselves to receive anew the promise of God in the form of a helpless infant.

At Southwood, Advent takes the more practical form of Christmas-themed crafts and stories, and an effort to bring extra food, along with jackets and other warm clothing donations.

Today’s craft is a Christmas ornament made of foam pieces that the kids can paste together with glue sticks. Most of the Southwood kids have trouble with complicated crafts; coloring and pasting are about all they can handle without extensive help. Bree, my adult daughter, has begun coming to Southwood, and together we keep the kids on track and make sure glue sticks are shared, everyone is listening to the instructions, no one is fighting or insisting that pieces are needed from another child’s kit, everyone understands the instructions, and everyone’s pieces are glued together the right way. This project has a number of pieces, and requires a little patience to achieve the desired result: a foam infant smiling from a foamy manger under a smiling star, with the caption, “God’s Greatest Gift.”

A couple of the kids express dismay that the serrated yellow pieces of the kit are meant to represent hay, not blankets. A few don’t know what “hay” is, so I explain that it’s a kind of dried grass that animals eat for food. I check on their understanding of “manger,” and that’s a good thing, because, although they all know the traditional story by heart, none of them know what all the words mean. A few of the kids think the manger is a kind of room or stable. A few kids understand that an “inn” is a place to stay; many of the welfare motels in Anaheim contain “inn” as part of the name. Of these kids, a few have “manger” confused with “manager,” as in “motel manager,” with the vague idea that Jesus was born in the motel manager’s office.

Actually, that’s not too far off the mark.

As Bree and I work around the table, making sure each child is able to complete each step of the craft project, we help the kids understand the words in the story. The inn is like a motel. There wasn’t any room there for a lady about to have a baby, so Mary and Joseph ended up with the animals in the stable, sort of like how sometimes people end up having to sleep in someone’s garage when they can’t afford a motel room. The manger, we explain, is a food holder for animals to eat from, so it was filled with hay, the animals’ food.

This brings a surprising flurry of disagreement from the kids. Jesus is God’s son. How could God’s son sleep in the middle of pet food? With no blankets? Didn’t Mary have baby stuff with her? Couldn’t they buy some?

“Well,” I explain, “Jesus was poor.”

The shock is evident on the kids’ faces, and they start to argue. No way! Jesus was rich! Kings brought him gifts. He could do miracles—why wouldn’t he have anything anyone could want? The Southwood kids are poor; they understand the difficulties of life on the downward spiral. Jesus chose to come here. Who would choose to be born poor, to worry about food and shelter on a daily basis? Their reaction reminds me of a quote from Carolyn Chute, who has said that her writing about poverty was “involuntarily researched.” Chute said:

"I have lived poverty. I didn't choose it. No one would choose humiliation, pain, and rage."

But, that’s exactly what Jesus did. We go through some parts of the story of Jesus’s life that the kids aren’t so familiar with: how he said he had no home, no place to lay his head; how he had to get his tax money from a fish; how he loved and defended the poor every day of his life. He could have chosen to be rich, but he didn’t. He chose to be poor.

Slowly, it dawns on them. Jesus was one of them.

Jesus, our brother, strong and good,
Was only born in a stable rude,
And the friendly beasts around him stood,
Jesus, our brother, strong and good.

Once in a Lifetime (Part Two)

You may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

According to a 2003 study by the OC Partnership Research Support Service, 80% of homeless people residing in motels become motel residents through financial hardship. They remain motel residents because they are unable to save the deposit amount necessary to get into a conventional apartment or because credit or eviction history keeps them from renting an apartment.

There are a lot of stories behind that statistic. We don’t ask the Southwood residents how they came to live there, but many of them volunteer their stories. Talking to people who work in other projects and ministries, stories are exchanged. That’s how I heard the curious term, “Love Eviction.”

I’d heard about love evictions before, but hadn’t known there was a term for them. A love eviction occurs when two people are living together in an apartment or house belonging to one of the partners, then there is a fight or breakup, and the person with the right to remain in the home kicks out the partner. A love eviction might leave a parent and child without any shelter if there is no notice given that a request to leave is forthcoming.

The same sort of kickout, informal eviction could happen between roommates, but in that case it’s not a love eviction. It’s also not a love eviction if someone leaves because of danger; for example, if one person in the home threatens or commits violence against another resident, and the resident flees. These kinds of situations contribute to something we see a lot at Southwood: people who arrive at the motel with nothing but the clothes they’re wearing and maybe a wallet or purse. No toothbrush, no toiletries, not even a change of clothes.

There are other reasons for people to become trapped in motel residence. They’re formally, legally evicted from a rented home; they are asked to leave or locked out by family members who are fed up with them; they have to leave a sobriety program; or they get out of jail or prison and have nowhere else to go—or their parole officer placed them there. For some, the motel is an upgrade from a homeless shelter or halfway house, or sleeping in their cars. And now, with the collapse of California’s economy, some motel residents are people whose homes, either rented or mortgaged, are in foreclosure.

Southwood is a meeting place, a turning point where the destinies of many different lives converge. For some, it’s a step down; for some, it’s a step up; for some, it’s a place to express gratitude for the grace of God; for some, it’s a place of despair and desperate prayer.
So, where is God at Southwood? Definitely present, though perhaps in some surprising places.

In his book, Simply Christian, NT Wright addresses the issue of God’s presence in the world. According to Wright, in the Judeo-Christian worldview, earth, God’s creation, and heaven, God’s home, are two separate and distinct dimensions that have the ability to interlock. Where they interlock can be variable or fixed.

Under the old covenant with ancient Israel, God could show up at various times and places. He met with Jacob, with Moses, and with Adam and Eve in Eden. He traveled with the Israelites through the desert. But the main fixed and dependable location for God’s presence on earth was the Temple. God could always be counted upon to be there.

One of the most striking things about the ministry of Jesus was that he greatly expanded the idea of where God could be located in the world. While Jesus was alive, and during his resurrected appearances to his friends after his death, God was present in Jesus. After Pentecost, with the gift of the Holy Spirit, God’s dwelling place changed to individual believers; Paul calls believers, “temples.” Jesus himself began setting up this idea prior to his death by instructing his followers, “…where two or three of you are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” His last recorded words, according to Matthew, are “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Under God’s new covenant in Christ, God’s people are the dwelling place, and God is present wherever his people are present.

Those aren’t the only times Jesus spoke of his presence in and among people. Also in Matthew, he speaks of being present in people in need, so much so that our good deeds to help those in need are credited by God as having been performed directly for Jesus. So, where is God at Southwood? Definitely present, in those in need as well as in those there to help meet those needs.

You may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

At any point in our lives, we stand at a juncture created by some combination of circumstance and choice. That we are often as surprised by our choices, and their consequences, as we are by our circumstances is part of the human condition. Our comfort, at every point in the times of our lives, is that God is invariably present. He is present in our need, he is present in our despair, and he is present in our gratitude and joy. Life may take all of us by surprise. God’s presence, our constant, shouldn’t.

Once in a Lifetime

As I crank over the car and start backing out of the garage on the short trip to Southwood, the radio comes to life at an interesting point in an old song:

You may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Indeed.

I have a much better idea how the Southwood residents got there than how I did. Or, maybe not. Maybe our stories are all variations on a theme.

I’ve been a Lutheran since the early 1970s; I was confirmed in 1972. I went to church pretty regularly, too, and was very active in mission work, until a personal tragedy left me unable to attend church. And I mean, “unable to attend church.” Literally unable to keep from bursting into tears long enough to make it through a service. Like Hagar, I ended up in the wilderness, outside of the organized religion world for a long time. And then, one day after thinking about it for a few years and checking out various Lutheran congregations for a while, it was time to start making my way out of the desert and back into spiritual civilization.

The Orange County motel situation had been bothering me for a long time, ever since I’d done some therapy work with a little girl who lived in a motel and had seen, through her eyes, what motel life was like. I would drive by motels and think of that girl. As I said, I’d been checking out Lutheran congregations in the area, reading newsletters online, and one congregation, Lamb of God, not only had a motel ministry, but was recruiting people to work in it. I had chosen my victim.

I was expecting to attend a service, sit in the back row, and leave quietly afterward. Best laid plans and all that aside, I was quite pleasantly mobbed by friendly and hospitable people who insisted I stay for coffee and were not the least put off by my heresy (Lutherans’ nearly worshipful love of coffee is legendary) when I had a Diet Coke instead. Of course, the question was raised, “What brought you here to Lamb of God?” and when I answered that, in addition to my car, the motel ministry had helped bring me to church, I was immediately put in touch with Angela. And so, on a bright Saturday morning many months later, I’m off to meet God, disguised as the residents of a rundown motel, and all of us there will be transformed in some way by that meeting.