Church Under the Bridge

Some of you may have already seen this and are looking for the new entry I promised with the answer to how Jesus fed 5,000 people. I still intend to write that one but I can't get the words to line up in the right order. There's just a lot more to say than I expected. I'll be back next week with that story. In the meantime, here is what happened when I took Zach to help the homeless.

I also checked on the status of our own homeless guy, Mitchell, and he didn't show up at Garland last week. If you'd like to know more about Church Under the Bridge they have a website: churchunderthebridge.org. I'm also recommending a book this week, a must read for anyone who wants to know what the Kingdom of God looks like: The Irresistible Revoultion by Shane Claiborne.

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I picked up Zach and Austen in Garland at 3:30. We drove to the new Presbyterian Mission Center where the Presbytery’s office is. At the PMC we met a group that had about three or four adults with a whole group of kids. We then drove in a caravan to Arlington to get another group of people. All in all, we ended up with a caravan of five cars, six adults, and about 17 kids.

I do not recommend caravans as a relaxing way of travel. I’m convinced we drove on every single interstate highway in the state of Texas…..at about 70 mph. I finally figured out to get behind the biggest and brightest car (a white van) so I could find the rest when some idiot cut into our line of cars; because, you know, once the idiot cuts in ahead of you they immediately slow down and let another five cars cut in ahead of them and the next thing you know the group is in Waco and you’re still back in Hillsboro.

Once in Waco, we gathered at the Central Presbyterian Church, one of the largest facilities I’ve seen. We stayed in their gym. (I said it was big) We left our gear inside and immediately went out to eat. Another wild ride and did I think to get somebody’s cell phone number just so if I got separated I could find my way back? Yes, I thought of it but I didn’t do it. Our caravan by now had become a faith exercise and I wasn’t about to admit any uncertainty.

At Ci’s Ci’s Pizza the adults talked a little about what we should cook. John and Rick have that relaxed attitude that comes from either great experience or great faith, I’m not sure which. Whatever, they didn’t worry too much about details, just “What should we cook?” I was going nuts after a while and took a napkin to make some sort of grocery list. On this list we had: 20 pounds of potatoes, 15 pounds of sausage, 10 dozen eggs, about 30 dozen flour tortillas, ten loaves of bread, ham, cheese, peanut butter, jelly, six boxes of brownie mix, bananas, grapes, apples……..stuff like that. Inside the store I tore the napkin into 3 lists and the kids went off to get the grub.

The tab at the HEB ended up around $300 to feed between 150-200 people. We went back to the church. This is how big their kitchen is: They had four ovens, two four-burner stoves, an industrial refrigerator and a counter top that was about 15 by 20 feet.

We started cooking the sausage, potatoes and eggs. I discovered something kind of interesting: sausage is so lean nowadays that we couldn’t rustle up enough fat to use in the other skillets to keep the eggs and potatoes from burning. We made about 200 sandwiches (ham & cheese and Peanut butter & jelly). Another tidbit I discovered: sandwich bags are slippery. We couldn’t stack the sandwiches until I put them in a box so the sides would be supported. We put the box of ham and cheese in the fridge and left the PBJ out. Then started assembling the burritos: a spoon of sausage, another of egg, and another of potato. Wrap it up in aluminum foil. We filled the refrigerator with these shinny tubes.

By this time it was one am and I was beat. They split the gym floor into boys’ side and girls’ side with a divider of chairs………which did nothing to really separate them; a few boys got as close to the line as they could get and, likewise, a few girls. There was giggling into the wee hours of the morning.

Around seven am we turned on the coffee and started the four ovens. Three hundred degrees was about right because we managed to reheat the burritos in two batches, filling the ovens each batch. Then we put it all in ice chests to keep them warm. We also heated up three huge cans of pinto beans and after draining most of the water, filled a gallon zip-lock bag. I would never have tried this myself and predicted disaster but not one bean left the bag. Not only did things stay hot, I watched the steam rise as people opened up the foil. And the beans didn’t really need a serving bowl and we just threw the bag away when it was empty.

We left around 9am and got to the bridge about 10. Again, I did something I had never done before: We left the access road, drove over the curb and parked our cars in the No Man’s land under the bridge. I looked around and here’s what I saw: There was a platform trailer with 2 portapotties that I immediately used because I had a pretty good idea what they would be like an hour or two later. There was a platform trailer with a generator and zillions of wires leading to another trailer that served as the stage, holding speakers, amplifiers and microphones. Still another trailer stood empty because they had already put out chairs for 200 people. Afterwards, when they were cleaning up, it took only 15 minutes to get the chairs back into the trailer.

We found a pleasant woman from Waco Mission setting up the serving tables and getting out coffee, tea and water. The key to timing this is to wait until fifteen minutes before we open the serving line. Any sooner and the line will form early and they will get tired of waiting.

There was a huge circle of people sitting off in a corner discussing something in great earnest. Something told me this was an AA meeting but it could have been Sunday School because they have both on Sunday mornings.

We set the kids to serving while we stayed in the background. I found a lady in a wheelchair and got one of the kids to take her a plate of food.

From our initial planning on the napkin it looked like an incredible amount of food. But I realized we were actually providing about a full day’s food for them. The burrito and beans and brownie were breakfast and lunch but they picked up a sandwich and banana to eat for dinner later in the day. So if you think about it that way, we were feeding people for $2 a day.

They were thankful and polite. They joked and cajoled each other. Most of them came here regularly and even had on name tags. This, after all, is a church. Jimmy Dorrell is their pastor and he went through the crowd reminding people that they needed to get a ticket for a big party they were planning for that evening. It would include a meal, swimming and a dance. It was free but to make sure they didn’t have an uncontrollable crowd it would have to be limited to members of the Church Under the Bridge and tickets were the only way to do it.

They had fantastic music, a few gospel and charismatic tunes but also a couple of standards you can find in any main line high-steeple church. They played one rock and roll song and encouraged us to dance to practice for the party. The announcements for the day included congratulating somebody named only by their initials for celebrating six years of sobriety. The short sermon was based on James 2:1-13 which points out that God doesn’t play favorites. This made me feel better because, by this time I was positive that God loves the poor more than the rich.

By one of those God Incidences I’ve come to enjoy I had heard about a new book that’s out called “The Irresistible Revolution” written by Shane Claiborne. I bought the book immediately after hearing about it. The day the book was delivered I found out Shane is scheduled to speak at Church Under the Bridge on Sept 10. I’m thinking about going to hear him speak. And, of course, to worship God. I just have this feeling God is going to show up. He was probably there the same day we were. Maybe he was the lady in the wheelchair. Maybe he was the old guy who gave us the weather report for the next three days. Or he could have been the lady I danced with. But I’ll just bet he was there.

I hope he was the lady I danced with. I’d like to be able to say I’ve danced with God.

Be Careful What You Pray For

A couple of weeks ago we had a program at church on the Homeless. Our youth had gotten involved with the problem at one of their mission trips this summer. We had four different mission opportunities this summer, so, if you were a kid at First Presbyterian you couldn’t really avoid one.

They came home ready to talk about the homeless. We had a whole worship service on the subject led by the youth and it was fantastic. The best part was when one of our high school freshmen, Zachary, stood behind the pulpit and boldly challenged our congregation to do something to help the homeless. I know I wasn’t the only person who was pumped and ready to help. Bring it on. All we needed was some homeless people to practice on.

The following week God sent us a homeless man. We called the cops on him.

There is more to the story than meets the eye and, on the whole, I was really kind of proud of our congregation more than I was upset with calling the cops.

It turns out this guy was a familiar face around town. He’s been a regular customer at the local food bank for about a year now and usually spends the night on the town square. So that kind of makes him an old friend. But that didn’t make any difference to our nursery lady Sunday. He scared the shit out of her.

Mitchell is slightly built, has very deep black weathered skin and wears his graying hair in dreadlocks. Now, dreadlocks are a little scary to most people. There’s the word “dread”, of course, which doesn’t help. Personally I find them kind of bouncy and light-hearted. I love the way Whoopie Goldberg’s dreads flounce around when she moves. But Mitchell and his dreadlocks were scaring our nursery lady.

And no one could really blame her. The incident exposed a very basic security lapse. Until Sunday I had never put much thought into the way our building complex is arranged. Our nursery is about as far from the Sanctuary as you can get and still be inside our building. We are a downtown church with every door unlocked on Sundays. And she was alone with a three year old when Mitchell showed up. I might have been a little scared myself.

The police had a brief conversation with Mitchell and left. People started arriving for Sunday School and the problem seemed to fix itself. That’s when I watched how we would treat our first homeless man since Zach’s challenge the week before.

I saw out of the corner of my eye that Mitchell stayed well supplied with doughnuts, coffee, handshakes and conversation. By the time I stopped to talk to him he was in a friendly mood and his only complaint was that he couldn’t get work. I came to the conclusion the guy wasn’t a mental case or a criminal, just an old guy down on his luck. I invited him to come worship with us and he said one of our others members had already asked him that and he was going to sit with him. Before the day was over, he had a stomach full of food, a short nap in our pew and a motel room for the night. All in all, I think we were fairly Christ-like to the guy.

I’m sure the church officers will discuss this at their next meeting. We are torn between the issue of keeping our children safe and our desire to be a welcoming church. We have to reconcile our responsibilities to our children and the woman who cares for them with the bold words of Matthew 25:35 “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

I don’t have the answer. But I found a nationally known program for the homeless called Church Under the Bridge and I’m taking Zach to Waco this weekend to scout it out. I’ll let you know what I find there.

As Rachel Naomi Remen says, “Perhaps the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.”

Grace Abounds

I once explained Grace to a high school Sunday school class by handing each kid in the class a five dollar bill. Then I sat down and waited for questions.

What’s this for?
Why did you give it to me?
I can’t keep this.
I didn’t earn it.

As I answered each question: that I gave it to them simply because I love them… You have to keep it… You can’t give it back. … You didn’t have to do anything to earn it…
They came to understand I was talking about Grace.

Then we came to the response to Grace part. I told them they could do whatever they wanted with it. I knew some of the kids in the class had more money than the others and some would value five dollars differently. Some would be more grateful than others. The responses would all be different. I wondered later if any of the bills showed up in the collection plate that day. But it was out of my hands, quite literally.

I understand grace in my own life by having a sister with many and major medical problems that included alcohol and drug addictions and schizophrenia, none of which she asked for, not to mention the lesbian part, which she didn’t ask for either. She was miserable for most of her life.

We were raised in the same house and by the same parents. We shared a bathroom and a bedroom for many years. We watched the same movies and read the same books. How did I emerge from the same gene pool with only having a big butt as my biggest complaint? How did I luck out with none of her problems? Grace is the only answer I have ever been able to come up with.

When Elizabeth was a freshman in college she had a checking account. She had run an errand for me one day and I owed her seven dollars. I didn’t have any cash on me so I wrote her a check. As I was writing it, Emily acted outraged. She wanted one.

What for? You didn’t do anything.
How about just for being cute?

We joke around that way in our family. There’s a lot of give and take. And Emily relies heavily on her talent for being cute. We bantered about until Emily eventually ended up with a check for seven dollars. On the memo line I wrote simply “for being cute.”

I was reminded of these examples of grace the other day listening to a friend tell how her daughter had gotten a huge and quite unexpected bonus at work. The daughter invited her parents over for dinner. She stood in her living room and proceeded to tell them about the huge sum of money she had come into. It was like winning the lottery, though I think serendipity describes it better. Serendipity isn’t nearly as tense as winning the lottery.

She told them what a great feeling it was to come into money she hadn’t planned on and didn’t really need the way you need a paycheck. As she described the luxury of deciding what to do with the money, she told them she realized she wouldn’t have the great job she had with the accompanying standard of living and this serendipitous gift if her parents hadn’t spend their own money to send her to college. She wanted to repay them for her college expenses. Then she handed them a check. A huge check.

My friend was taken back. This was grace. It wasn’t really so much a repayment for college as it was a response to grace. The parents had never expected to see the college money back. Most of us don’t. We figure it’s part of the job. It comes with having kids. You buy school supplies every fall, starting with crayons and work your way up to computers. You go to Girl Scout campouts and football games. You pay for orthodontia. If you can afford it, you pony up for college. It’s part of being a parent. You never expect to get any money back.

I asked what they were planning to do with the money. She told me they had a dream vacation they had wanted to take for years but didn’t quite have the funds. The check was going to make that dream trip come true.

Grace abounds.

Drugs

Beaven ran out of his allergy medicine last night. If he as much as looks at a dog he starts sneezing. So he asked me to get some when I went to the store. As I opened the door to leave, three of our dogs ran inside, scratching themselves and fluffing their fur. So this became an Important Mission.

He normally takes a prescription medication but there was some kind of snafu between the doctor’s office and the pharmacy. Coricidin D works in a pinch he says. Easy enough, I think.

Except the Coricidin D is one of the medicines that now requires something close to a Senate investigation to buy. Ever since folks began cooking up pseudoephedrine to make methamphetamine the powers that be have tried to make it harder to buy lots of the stuff over the counter. I’m not sure how the chemical works but it sounds like the “pseudo” part means “fake”, according to my high school etymology. I guess the “real” ephedrine doesn’t hurt anything.

I had to go to the counter to get the stuff and ask a Real Live Person if I could buy some. She asked for my driver’s license. Then started tapping things into her computer. She had really long and strong fingernails and I was fascinated by the sound her nails made on the screen. Then I became awestruck by how long it was taking her to tap-tap-tap my information into the computer. She must have been writing down every single fact about me that is on my license. Now the government knows that I bought Coricidine D as well as where I live, how old I am and what color my eyes are. Also, the fact that I need glasses to see to drive a car. Tap, tap, tap, tappity tap tap. What more about me could she want to know?

Finally she paused and looked up and asked, “phone number?” I guess if I buy too much of this stuff and government calls me to ask why.

By this time I was in awe of the powerful goods I had in my grocery cart. Normally, I am prone to park the cart somewhere in the aisle if it gets crowded and walk off to get something without taking the basket with me. Not today. I kept a watchful eye on my basket, hovering over it like a mother hen. I had Valuable Cargo. Highly restricted cargo that the Government was interested in. I never felt this way buying diapers.

Finally, I was ready to go home and thought I’d save time by using one of the Self Check Out lines. This was quite a gamble, I know, but I’ve gotten used to them and there was no waiting at this one. It started out telling me they had to have a Real Live Human check the weight of my newspaper. This didn’t make sense. Why does the weight matter? They’re not going to make me pay more if the paper has more news that day. Am I to be punished if George Bush does something stupid that day, like starting a way in Iraq?

After I finally got a clerk to approve my buying a newspaper I checked out the rest, saving my Valuable Drugs for last. “Need Authorization Validated for This Purchase” appeared on the screen. Apparently, we needed someone to check my life story the other lady tap-tap-tapped into her computer in the pharmacy. And, of course, by this time there wasn’t a soul around the stand where they watch us Self-Checking Criminals. I knew I was in for a long wait. I unpacked everything and changed to a lane with a Real Live Human. From there the visit to the store went seamlessly. When the Real Live Human came to my drug purchase she bypassed the question with one tap of one key. I was approved. Apparently I don't look like the kind of person who cooks up meth in a trailer.

I intend to ask my friend, Kit, about all of this. She has been a Drug Dealer for years. At least that's what her son has called her ever since he could impress his middle school friends with the term. She is, in fact, a pharmacist at the SMU Health Center. Kit will know all about the torture I just went through. She will probably tell me that this supervision over pseudoephedrine is even harder for her.

Except I can’t call her until the weekend. This is her second-busiest time of the year. All the co-eds returning to school will be in her pharmacy this week to get their birth control prescriptions refilled. Her busiest time is at the end of the year when they all want a three-month supply to tide them over the summer because they don’t want their hometown pharmacists to know they take birth control pills. Flu season? It’s a piece of cake compared to selling fake ephedrine and birth control pills.

Maybe a Few Words Today

I may take the week off this week. I’m back from Guatemala and had a wonderful time. Thank you, Elizabeth for posting to the blog for me last week. Right now, we’re in Day Three of Grandmother Camp and I’m sore from swimming the past two days. I thought I’d have plenty of words for you from either my trip to Guatemala or Synod Youth Workshop. But I don’t this morning. I barely have words at all. Maybe it’s the whirlwind of keeping up with the grands. I’m just feeling a little blurry this morning. Whatever words of wisdom that lay fallow deep within my brain will have to lie there for another week. Until then, there are two experiences I’ve had on my two trips that are not necessarily wise but interesting:

At Synod Youth Workshop I had the best time I think I’ve ever had. Maybe it was because I went as a sponsor with no responsibilities rather than as I usually go-- as a small group leader. All I had to do this week was breathe. No wonder I loved it. The highlight of the week, for me, was the eyeball photo one of the girls in the group took. We were sitting at a Hideaway Pizza waiting for our order and chilling out when, Laken, one of the girls in our group picked up my camera. She stared at it for a while then took a picture of her eyeball. This may be an old trick—forgive me if I sound dated here—but I got a huge kick out of it. We even sent the snap to the staff to exhibit during the slide show the next morning. This is why I love the event so much. Teenagers are just so inventive and uninhibited; you gotta love them for it.

About the only other new and exciting thing I’ve done lately was buy a pair of Crocs before I left for Guatemala. This was not to blindly follow the pop culture that dictates my every move. It had been raining every afternoon in the town where we would meet and the retreat facilitator advised the shoes because they are waterproof. I kind of like the shoes, especially going through security at the airport, because they are so easy to slip on and off. I like them so much, I got a pair for each of my granddaughters. But now I have to deal with the fights over the blue pair because the brown pair, in the words of the five year-old, “look nasty.”

One more thing before I close and go make pancakes for the girls: We arrived from Guatemala at the new international terminal at DFW airport. As we strode through customs into the terminal we joined a whole group of servicemen coming home from Iraq. The minute the guys went through the door there was thunderous applause with a CD player playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.” It really did give me chill bumps. Maybe we did learn something from Viet Nam, after all.