From the Suburbs to the City (part 1)
I suppose it makes the most sense to begin at the beginning. The trouble, of course, becomes deciphering the precise point at which the whole story starts. Possibly it was on the first day of the second semester of junior year of highschool. I walked into chemistry class, scanned the seating chart and found myself assigned to a desk in the back corner next to someone named Adam, who would tease me mercilessly about being a Canadian, write me poetry on gum wrappers, and someday become my husband.
We were young white suburbanites, our feet firmly planted in systems we couldn’t see, mired in the upward mobility of the American Dream, available to us just as we always assumed it would be.
Tracing back every thread of this life we have knit together offers us lots of chances to see the ways God was preparing our hearts and shaping our lives to reflect the story he was writing. But at the time, it mostly meant one quiet yes and then another. Footsteps of obedience to adventure, and occasionally to sacrifice, that led us somewhere unforeseen and beautiful. Somewhere we likely would have run from if you had told us about it in advance, but that today we wouldn’t trade for anything.
So how did we get from newlywed suburbanites to this life here in the city? It all started with the summer that changed everything. Adam took a job as the “head male counselor” at a summer camp for “at-risk kids,” and I agreed to tag along. So we packed up for seven weeks, and one early June Monday morning, I was handed a camera and a list of camper names, surreptitiously shifting my future forever.
I stood there in my flip-flops, charmed by the kids arriving from the city hanging out the windows of buses and vans winding their way past the lake and in-between towering oaks. I flipped the camera on, and framed each camper carefully as they came to the check-in table. I tried to memorize the planes of their face and the specific tint of their brown skin, matching it to the name scrawled on the card they held out in front of them: Detavious, Sharonda, Xavier, Luis, Brandy, Brandon.
Learning their names led to learning their stories. The life the kids casually described shocked my middle-class sensibilities, betraying my naivety and belying the faith I had always unconsciously rooted in the American Dream. Even before camp, Adam and I had been wondering if following Jesus only meant volunteering in the nursery at our church and having Bible study over dessert with our closest friends. Those dark evenings at camp, God seemed more radical and less safe than we had imagined him from the padded chairs of our megachurch.
After camp, despite my best efforts to return to business as usual, the lingering imprints of that summer gripped me. The idea that Jesus called us to “love our neighbors as ourselves” suddenly felt different, critical, immediate. Because the kids who lived less than an hour from us were our neighbors, and loving them meant something, we knew, though we weren’t yet quite sure what that something was.
Not long after that first summer, I accepted a part-time job at the kids program for the ministry where I had been volunteering since camp, working in a large housing project. Adam and I found ourselves spending an inordinate amount of time there, wandering among the brick buildings and laundry fluttering on wires strung outside. It was here that we first met two quite ordinary (and also brave/hilarious/strong/extraordinary in every way) nine-year old boys who would once again change our lives.
We decided, unanimously, that these two boys needed us (sorry guys, we were kind of the worst). I believed I had finally found my “purpose” in mentoring this unlikely duo. I was idealistic and naive, more than a little prideful, and smugly sure of all the ways we could "help" these young men; even, daresay, “save” them. Oblivious all the while to the ways they had already begun saving us.
I’ve changed my views since these days when I held my first little giraffe and walked through the projects with a gregarious nine-year-old (who I still love 13!years later). I’ve discovered the ways that good intentions are rarely enough to stop us from unintentionally doing harm. Today, we try to help mentors with Blueprint 58 sidestep some of the mistakes we made with better training, more sensitivity, and lots of reiterating the fact that they are not going to save anyone. Jesus is already here, and more often than not, we will learn far more about Him from the nine-year-old boys and their families then we have to teach. Even now, our relationships with these two boys have been our most potent teachers, our lives changed irrevocably for the better for knowing and loving them both.
At Herndon Homes, we helped lead what was called “sidewalk Sunday school.” Pulling up in an old bread truck that converted to a stage, we would throw candy into a crowd of kids when they memorized Bible verses. We played silly games, led relay races, offered “character lessons,” and sent the kids home with donated chips and juice boxes. Once, twice, three times a week, we visited, knocking on hundreds of metal doors to introduce ourselves to parents and grandparents and uncles and friends. We quickly found ourselves scholars of these generous kids.
“What are those blue things?” One boy asks me sitting on a bench next to the playground, tracing fingers along the veins in my arm. “You have them too,” I tell him, “you just can’t see them because your skin is darker.”
They always taught us good-naturedly, “Don't knock so loud, that way we won't think you're the police.” We would nod, making mental notes. I suppose they all recognized us more readily than we did them. We knew them only from what the media and our overprotective parents had taught us about life cloaked in brown skin in the housing projects of Atlanta. They, on the other hand, had encountered us before: young white Christians with idealistic dreams of rescuing and converting their children and grandchildren from poverty to prosperity.
We spent days earnestly collecting bullet casings and empty beer cans in big black trash bags, while the neighborhood kids followed us around and helped us half-heartedly, not because they were lazy but because they recognized in ways we couldn’t that our work would always be endless and possibly fruitless, indeed there never came a week where we collected any less.
Even still, we learned. We probably (definitely) made dangerous assumptions along the way, filled the considerable gaps in with our knowledge with inferences and speculations based primarily on stereotypes (sigh). We simply stuck around long enough to start caring about people on the level that always makes them impossibly dear. Not less messy or easier, but nothing real or worth fighting for ever is.
Because of these two boys we loved, along with their families and neighbors, we came to understand the depth of needs and the complexity of systems that interacted to widen the gaps in flourishing in our city. But also because of them, we finally understood the depths of our own needs, and the richness that diverse community and relationships would bring to our lives and to our understanding of God.
