the green thumb and much much more

Rachel and I don't have much yard to work with but we try to make the most of it. Here is our first attempt at bringing a little creation to our home. As you can see it is very basic, consisting of only plants, but it is a beginning nonetheless(and yes this is pretty much the extent of our yard). Eventually we desire to have a small garden with vegetables and fruits as well as many more beautiful plants. Im starting out with this because it is a small part of a bigger idea that I am looking into under the umbrella of sustainable living. I recently bought this book called "ToolBox for Sustainable City Living" 

      

I have a good friend in Baton Rouge who is wanting to start a community garden to give back to the Baton Rouge community as well as provide basic skills to underprivileged areas of BR. He is also trying to get crew from the Rhizome Collective  to come to BR and put on a work shop. Essentially it would be a workshop on permaculture which is a multi-disciplinary practice used to design long lasting human communities. Its essential goal is to create intensively cultivated spaces capable of providing for as many human needs as possible in as small of an area as possible. By doing so, humans can be self-reliant and lessen their impact on their surrounding environments in a way that doesn't rely on outsourced energy and resources (xvi).  It seems like something that you could apply in your life in whatever kind of community you live in, learning how to use and recycle different materials to be able to perform everyday uses. They also make a great statement about the state of capitalism and its consequences and that is that "it requires infinite expansion and consumption of material resources. In a world that is fragile and finite, such a system is inherently unsustainable." (p.xii,xiii). Just something that has been going through my mind, I will keep updates on the progress of both this project and our venture in it. 

Washington D.C. and the beloved community

Two weeks ago Rachel and I attended a conference in Washington D.C. titled "Training for Change: Vote out Poverty Campaign" it was hosted by Sojourners and is part of their annual Call to Renewal/Pentecost conference. It was one of those things you expereince where, like trying to capture a beautiful moment with a photo and how it too often doesn't do the moment justice, trying to put it to words really won't skim the surface of what we experienced, not just at that conference but what we experienced all together in D.C. 

The conference had speakers, panel discussions and workshops like many others do, but the people that were leading all of these were not ordinary people, they were extraordinary people. They were priest, pastors and civil rights activists from all over the United states, from every denominational background you could imagine, every age you could imagine, all ethnicities, both sexes, movers and shakers in the Kingdom of God, and they were all friends, brothers and sisters. There were civil rights activists who had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King and there were new civil rights activists fighting for immigrant rights and living wages. There were people who had worked in Calcutta and with Mother Teresa. All of this, to me, was overwhelming. To be in the presence of these people and their stories, their stories that will bring you to tears while at the same time light a fire of righteous anger in you, will never leave me. The stories of injustice that happen all around our country and world are present today just as much so as ever. We as the church, and we has human beings need to recognize that our will is to preserve justice within the human race with love and humility. 

The conference was to train us how to be grassroots organizers in our local church or faith based communities, to lobby for the poor because they can't afford to do it themselves. There are two goals that we are supposed to organize people to pledge for and to have in mind when they cast their votes, one is a domestic goal of reducing poverty in the United States by 50% over the next ten years and the other is to meet the millenium development goals set in place by the UN to reduce poverty internationally. So we are supposed to first register voters if they aren't already registered and then get people to sign pledge cards saying that they will vote these issues next elections and then, like a petition, we take the voter pledge cards and bring them to our state elected officials and say here are your constituents and this is what they are voting for, are you on board? and then Sojourners will make it public and next April there is a rally in D.C. where we will have meetings with our elected officials and hold them accountable to their pledges. It is kind of tricky for us because we don't have a traditional home church but we think we have figured out a way to make it happen. So we are both excited and anxious about pulling it off. 

We were also blessed to meet some amazing people our age who were doing amazing things, big and small, all over the country and world. It was encouraging to see people living in intentional community with each other. Guys committing to live in true community with each other, and also girls doing the same, and even some couples committing to live life together and raise families together. We also met a lot of people from bigger cities who were choosing to move from their urban homes to downtown( not the hip/artsy parts and not gentrification) but where the people that they are working and fighting for live. You have to live with the people, you can't just go in and help once a month, you have to immerse yourself in their lives and into their community, creating a beloved community. Such a beautiful thing. There was this one guy from Toronto who lived in a poorer part of the city and did a lot with the kids around him and tried to show them that they were not poor, that actually they were richer than 40% of the world and showed them examples of what impoverished was, and then took it to the next level and gave them a since of empowerment and wealth by getting them to send a pair of their basketball shoes to kids who didn't have any shoes at all. He called it two kinds of oppression that poor kids/people face, internal and external oppression, and he was trying to reverse the image of themselves that they are told they are. This is just one of many beautiful stories that we heard. This is love, this is the gospel of Jesus, this is tangible.

We need to start living and voting with the love and compassion of Jesus

"Breaking News" flashed across every news station a moment ago with the sub-title "Bush comparing Obama to Nazi appeasers" and "Bush suggests Obama wants appeasement for terrorist." Here are a few startling facts that are not well known and should be a concern... 

"The 2006 budget showed that US military expenditures were twenty-one times larger than diplomacy and foreign aid combined, and that the United States was dead last among the most developed nations in foreign aid as a percentage of gross domestic product. One wonders what would happen if good-hearted Americans realized that a mere 10 percent of the US military budget, if reinvested in foreign aid and development, could care for the basic needs of the entire worlds poor." 

"Even if you take all the rest of the world's weapons sales and put them together, they don't match US weapons exports. My country can boast that we produce 53.4 percent of the worlds weapons. Most Americans are either uninformed about these figures, apathetic, or perhaps they believe that McNamara was more rational than President Jimmy Carter, who in 1976 saud "We can not have it both ways. We can't be the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of arms."

"It gets worse. In 2003, 80 percent if the top buyers of US Weapons (twenty of the twenty five top clients) were countries that our own State Department labeled undemocratic or countries known for their failure to uphold human rights, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In 1999, the US weapons industry supplied arms to 92 percent of the conflicts in process anywhere on the planet, and in a stroke of elegant fairness, often supplied both sides in conflicts. Perhaps most shocking and awful of all:between 1998 and 2001, the United States, Great Britain, and France earned more income from selling weapons to developing countries than the gave those developing countries in aid"

(all of these passages in quotes are take from 'Everything Must Change' by Brian McCalren with annotated sources in the back of the book.)

What if we had a President who stood up against this and perhaps wanted to talk conflicts out, through diplomacy, rather than immediately going to war and perhaps saving us from the deaths of nearly 1,000,000 Iraqis and 4,000 Americans among the countless others who we have supplied arms to. If we as people have any compassion and love for the rest of the world we have to stop voting for policies that contradict the love, humility, meekness and forgiveness that we are taught through Jesus.

We would be in a far better place than we are right now not only in our country but also in our world. I read this passage in a book im reading right now and it fits perfectly in describing this moment  "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him." -Tolstoy

Blowin' in the Wind

In my recent spike in political interest I started to focus on the wrong solution(but with good intentions of course). I started putting my faith into governing bodies in the form of an individual candidate that true authentic change for the better could happen. Not that one person can't bring change for the better, but that the means through which that change is brought by the individual is the key to what my focus should be on. What I mean be this is putting my faith and energies into a changing wind. Here is a powerful image by Jim Wallis to hep convey this idea: 

"If we look back, we realize that political systems(not to mention business, military, and even religious systems) have, in spite of their high ideals and noble ambitions, frequently been driven by the winds of expediency, self-interest, fear, greed, and pressure. So, looking around today, we see politicians wetting their fingers and raising them to see which way the political wind is blowing-to see what voters want so they can remain popular, raise donations, and secure reelection. Wisdom and honesty tell us that we aren't going to change politicians much in the future. They're always going to be wetting their fingers and testing the wind. So, Jims says, there's only one hope: we're going to have to change the wind.

 Changing the wind would mean changing public opinion, which requires changing the values that guide people individually and as groups, which in turn requires changing the vision of what is both possible and desirable, which ultimately means changing our framing story. In other words, changing the wind means doubting, rejecting, and defecting from our old framing stories, and instead, discovering and adopting-in a word, believing- a new framing story. That, once again, is exactly where I believe Jesus steps into human affairs, challenging us simply to believe his good news (Mark 1:15), and to believe him as the bearer of that good news (John 6:29, 35; 7:38; 10:37; 14:1)."

War

"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born"

-Francois Fenelon

A life of Activism

While sitting at Rachels restaurant today I had a very intriguing and encouraging conversation with a couple that actually live a few streets down from us in downtown Covington. It is a couple that both myself and Rachel have been particularly drawn to for a while because they both frequent our restaurants and downtown Covington quite a bit and have a unique freedom to their style, so one day we got to talking and realized that we lived by each other and have since taken part in small talk from time to time when we would run into one another. Today was a different day. I decided to bring my cup of coffee over to their table and sit down and get to know them on a deeper level. We ended up talking for a quit a while and it was one of the most challenging and real conversations I have ever had with, more or less, complete strangers. 

It turns out that they have been political activists for about five years now and so we talked about that and about different things all relating to humanity, war, love, peace, civil rights, human rights, the constitution, and etc. Then they asked me what I was passionate about, because they could obviously see I was somewhat like them. So I started telling them that over the past two years my eyes have been opened to a new world, the entire world and not just America, I have begun to realize that we are all people and all deserve love regardless if we are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, American, Iraqi, Chinese, etc. I then started telling them how I have started to become passionate about social justice and politics and that I am trying to figure out how to merge the two. I told them that I have been discovering an emerging view of Jesus that I had never been exposed to before and that this new view of how Jesus came to live a life to show us how to have peace and justice and equity is something that is driving this passion in me.  So we went on for a  while longer before wrapping it up and exchanging contact information and we went our separate ways. On my walk home my mind was racing with everything that we had been talking about. And the thought that a life of activism is something that we owe our friends and family and neighbors(both domestically and globally) was stuck in my mind. To wrap this up, the common denominator that both of us said lead to our desire for activism is EXPOSURE, we were all exposed to more truth that had not previously been shown to us in our little worlds that we came from. And so the main thing that we both said was essential for change is AWARENESS, and that awareness is the backbone of our activism. We as people and as citizens need to be aware and educated on and about the governing bodies that we put our faith in ( whether it be the U.S. Government or the Church). Once you have the information you can choose what to do with it, but I know  that I personally can't ignore it.

the power of words

Today I have been reflecting a lot about the power of words and opinions and the affect, whether good or bad, they can have on you and particularly the affect they can have on a relationship(of any level) when those words and opinions are disagreed upon. The reason why I've been thinking a lot about it is because over the past month or so I have started to voice my opinions and beliefs more, either through the internet like this or in person, and my opinions and beliefs have changed a lot over the past year and in the opposite direction than most. I almost started feeling apologetic about them today, but I thankfully stopped and realized that I couldn't afford to let my voice go unheard. Why, you might ask? Because my opinions and beliefs have changed due to the exposure to other viewpoints and information that I had never been exposed to before, or perhaps I was too scared to expose myself to them for the freedom that came in that also carried the potential for what I have been feeling today. But I feel as though I have had a blindfold removed from my eyes and I want to share this new view that I am experiencing. So I will end with an oft quoted poem from Robert Frost to sum this up.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.