changing directions

My church has had a huge effect on me pursuing community for five years.  Recently we have been meeting to discuss common life and more of a community in our body, the way Acts in the New Testament, and Jesus outlined and lived out.  Tonight I read these following paragraphs at the meeting, and it reflects the most recent calling I've had concerning my journey. . .

The book the Irresistible Revolution has dug far into my heart deeper then most anything, as I feel attuned to the conflicts and issues of Philadelphia personally.  After I graduated college I joined Americorps at the last minute and moved in with a friend and her mother outside Philadelphia, where i would walk 3 blocks, take the trolley, then ride the L train, then walk another 5 blocks deep into The Kensington section of Philadelphia, a few blocks north of the Simple Way.  It took about an hour.  There I worked in the office and warehouse, and after feeling not used enough, was given an entire project that overwhelmed me.  Holding a BA in photography, they thought I'd be great teaching inner-city kids nutrition in after school programs.  Well, I am a vegetarian. . .After 3 pm, I'd hop buses everyday deeper into the poorest sections of north Philly into crumbling but majestic churches and try to convince kids that carrots grew underground and work my understanding and acceptance that the Muslim kids don't eat until sundown during Ramadan.  

All this introduction into my introduction to Philly and the brink of the iceberg of needs there gives me the connection I feel towards the Simple Way, and the path I naturally took in the city - after the Food Bank gig was over, I worked in 2 coffee shops - one in the subway station under city hall and one across from the orchestra hall.  So many people with places to go, important, lucrative places.  I was not living as a Christian those days, but in many ways I was, even in my sins.  I had been saved as a youth, grown up in church, and prayed.  But I drank and smoked, cursed and lived with my boyfriend, then had a baby. . .but in the busy cave under the busy city, I saw Jesus in my friend and manager - a woman named Rose Mary who shot up heroin on her lunch breaks.  (last I saw her she was kicking heroin, visiting me in New Mexico while driving to California).  Among the city officials and lawyers and doctors, the other regulars were homeless - the kids and the old veterans, the insane and the ones who held too much knowledge and empathy for their own good.  Rose Mary showed unending patience and love with them - we talked and handed out coffees - remembering how many creams they liked as much as we did with the tipping customers.  Rose Mary was the first I told when I found out I was pregnant and walked with me through the entire process.  It was only natural that I handed out the left-over gourmet sandwiches and pastries to the brothers and sisters sleeping on the street vents on my way home everyday.  In the deepest pockets of my heart, this love and concern came from God - "all good things come from God."  And though my personal life was a mess, I was happiest living in the only white apartment on our block in west Philly.  I was one with that community and though we lived in separate houses, the proximity made anything outside every one's concern, and here was my introduction to community.  Sure it was the ghetto type of community, but I saw it everywhere, everyone had that sense.  

Shane Claiborne took that ideal I share with him and ran with it.  I was still much too caught up in having fun the majority of the time to commit to social reform through God's love, but all that in my past has prepared me, and given me a longing I feel resurrected through the words I've been reading, the family I've found here, the words I hear here.  Shane says Christians pretend to not understand the Bible and Jesus' words because if we really do understand, then why aren't we selling what we have and living with the poor?  Herein lies another problem for me - I've always been 'poor' - yet I have great stuff.  And kids.  Now what do I do?  What do we do?  Remain comfortable and help out with a meal or 2 with the homeless, the widows and orphans, or do we take those words to heart and admit we really do understand them?  To me, community looks like this - selling our things, our houses, giving our lives to God as Jesus gave his life to us, and opening up in ways that should scare us cross-eyed to what we are meant to be a followers of God.  We talk about the Simple Way and Mother Teresa and the Psalters, but from our own views, our own American culture, reassuring ourselves that God has worked us into the culture in just the right way.  I believe in revolution, in church, in love conquers all, and most of all complete and pure TRUST.  Physical Community is not a comfortable little farm, as I would have it to be, but  modest shelters like Jesus, the Dali Lama, Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and the rest of the saints who live with the poor dwell in.  To me, it begins with letting go and never ends from there.  My friend shared a phrase he hangs on his fridge with me - "Let Go or Be Dragged."  Revival in the body of Christ needs to be more  revolution!  And yes, that scares me cross-eyed.