We're Going to Phoenix

Michael: “And the best part is, in Phoenix, we won’t have anything to do with that family.”

George Michael: “But…don’t you always say family first?”

Michael: “Yes I do, but that is not a family. It’s a bunch of greedy, selfish people who have our nose. And Aunt Lindsay.”

George Michael: “She’s not my real aunt?”

Michael: “Not her real nose. I’ve got a picture of her when she was 14 in a swimming cap. Looks like a falcon.”

Welp, Week 1 is done. A success, I would say. Two houses were completely painted while the other was scraped and mostly primed, waiting on its color next week. The groups worked for three days and then took a trip Friday up 59 to Alabama Adventure. This job is still a bit of an adjustment for me. While I still have a great deal of responsibility, making sure groups get to where they need to be with the supplies they need and the like, I still don’t have near the responsibility that I did last summer, especially this week. The groups provided their own programs, so aside from a few nights of leading worship, Tori and I just hung around at night.

The house that I was responsible for was the house that could not be finished this week. The homeowner is an elderly woman who is quite ill and lives with her son, for now at least. Because of her condition, the kids were not able to interact with her hardly at all. That is unfortunate, seeing as I believe it would’ve made the experience richer for this ‘particular’ set of volunteers. I was, however, able to have a few, albeit, short conversations with her son, who occupied a chair on the front porch. I’ve got a blog in the works on what painting a house does for a family, but that should be looked forward to at a later date. He is a great guy and was thrilled to see us pull up everyday.

It’s tough to tell a van full of 13 and 14 year old kids who’ve come to Birmingham to paint a house to hold off on the brushes and grab a scraper. That’s what I had to do, though. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some whining. But, they did a great job. After, of course, they asked me some form of the question, “Can we paint yet?” as many times as Nick Saban says “aight” and bumps into a prospective student athlete.

One thing this week has given me is a newfound respect for those youth leaders and parents who work with junior high age kids. They have a special gift. The problem with trying to relate to 13 and 14 year old boys is that in order for me to do so, I must treat them like my friends, which involves joking around with them, which involves them losing any respect for my position, which involves them acting like 13 and 14 year old boys and causing me to be irritable beyond belief.

I hope you enjoyed my Arrested Development reference at the beginning of this post. One thing I realized throughout this week in dealing with a lot of these…we’ll call them ‘privileged’ kids…is how connected we really are. In this particular episode of Arrested Development, Michael finally gets fed up with the shenanigans of the Bluth family and leaves. He does, however, come back with the theme of that episode becoming how much the family needs each other. It’s a little like this with our family, it seems. Not my actual family though. Mitchell has never tried to steal every girl I’ve ever dated, Meredith rarely takes up charity work on a whim, Mom is not a manipulating alcoholic and Pops isn’t in prison for building houses for Sadaam.

**Note: If you’re not an avid follower of Arrested Development, the preceding references will most likely sound ridiculous and not make any sense. Apologies.

The “family” I’m talking about is this priesthood we all share in the faith we all seem to proclaim. Reading Ephesians lately, I’ve pondered what “unity in the Spirit” actually means. We certainly don’t all get along. There were times this week when I certainly didn’t feel a lot of love for some of those kids. For example:

Text from JC to Tori: “I almost ended my 22-year streak of not striking a child a second ago…”

The point that I came to realize is this. God calls us to unity. Unity not in absolute agreement. Unity not even in “liking” people. The unity we are called to, in my opinion, is when so much grace is given to us that we begin to see our attitudes towards each other, each child of God, as such, and not as the annoying character traits, bad attitudes and whining. When we are changed, when we repent, when we allow grace to take over, we turn around from wherever it is we’re going (Oh man I wish you hadn’t said Phoenix…), and turn into the priesthood that God has ordained, and whether we know it or not, love wins, grace prevails, and the Kingdom comes.

In the coming weeks, pray for us. That we would build relationships with the kids that will come, the families and homeowners we will serve, and the people we work with. Don’t, however, pray for patience. I’m not quite ready to deal with that yet. If you’re reading this, odds are I know you and love you, but if I don’t, I love you anyway.

pax

jc