As I started writing my blog entry for today I wanted to comment on the simplicity of creating a ghetto and the hardship to correct its misfortunes. I started my thoughts with ….
My internship includes a series of books tackling the call to Christian community development in the inner city. Our most recent read, Beyond Charity by social justice fighter John M. Perkins explains that “it is not hard to make a ghetto.” In fact, it is fairly simple. Using a quote from Bob Lupton, an Atlanta community developer, Perkins describes that in order to create a ghetto “just remove the capable neighbors…withdraw the students of achieving parents…and extract the upwardly mobile role models from the community.” Sadly, that is just what as occurred in the United States. but how exactly to those people become removed from a community? Where do they go? Well for many cities in the United States, those people were never there in the first place to remove. With the country’s housing history, a fatal move in the ….
However, as I listened to Jennifer Knapp’s music CD while typing in my kitchen, I began to cry and like people often to, I cried for what seemed to be no reason. However, as the tears turned to weeping and what Oprah calls “the ugly cry,” I knew that this cry was one to spend with God to understand what He was trying to convey to me. This quote from one of her songs especially hit me…
“If I give my life, if I lay it down, can you turn this life around?
Can I be made clean by the suffering of my soul?
Can I be made whole again?”
After spending some time with the Lord, I wanted to share with you what I felt impressed by Him on my heart….There is a burden that we all carry. It is the burden which God alone has placed on your soul. While I could have told you in the past few years that I wanted to work with low income populations in the field of social work, I was never as convinced as I am in this moment. But this is more than a certain income bracket, more than a branch of social work. This is my life. Actually, it is not my life at all. There is nothing about me that is my own except my sin that I hold so dearly to. Everything that is good is from God. Even those burdens that we each carry, they are good. And they are from God. The past hour I have spent weeping over my burden. My burden is here. Right here in Church Hill. How can I have a burden for the people of this community? I do not know what it is like to live on welfare, to not be able to make each month’s rent, to not have a father around, to be raised solely by the streets, and to struggle reading. I can’t tell anyone that I live around that I understand, or that I know what it is like to be in their position. But I can tell them that while I cannot personally empathize with what they are going through, God has placed that same struggle, that same suffering, that same pain on my heart. It is that pain, that suffering, that fight that makes me weep for the kids and families that I work with. That is what the burden feels like that God places on your heart and this is the one He has placed on mine. It is so powerful and heavy to carry another’s burdens that all I am able to do is to give it the Lord. I must give those concerns, those pains, and those hurts over to Him and ask Him to help me trust in Him with the result. I don’t know what God has in store for my life but I feel impressed tonight by God to be here – to be in Church Hill for a time. Whether it is this summer or for my life, I give it completely to Him. In fact, I give it, my life, back to Him. This burden to serve the inner city is completely God’s but I carry it with great pride. I love it here. I want to be here to see change, to see my future house be a house of the Lord where disciples are raised, where children can come as a safe haven, where they can all live and grow and be fed physically and spiritually. I want to have an open house filled with children who need a home, a house filled with moms burdened by the harsh reality of their worlds searching for the one God who can heal their broken hearts, a house filled with whoever needs a house. God touched my heart tonight and as a write these words I feel impressed to be held accountable to the commitment that I made to God to give him my life. I gave God my life back to Him once again to be used in any way he wanted, to listen to the relentless beating of the passion within my heart to be a part of God’s hand here. Right here.
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