Spring Semester About to Begin

Well, back at school. The 3 weeks at home were good to catch up with everyone and to get down to Miami to see Christ the King church (they are a Seminarian partnership church of the seminary and they help support our education for 4 of us from FL with funds from their annual Yard Sale. By the way, they must have one huge yard sale given what they take in over a weekend). I was able to get some work done around the house for when we move. The garage is almost clean. Given when we moved in you could not even walk into the garage I think a lot of progress has been made.


The 10 days in Atlanta and the Urban immersion were very eye opening and fruitful. I learned two core things. If you think someone is different than you, not as deserving, not as important, not as blessed, get to know them and then detail why you think they are different. Getting to know people brings down barriers and we see that each of us is a child of God. As such we are called to do what we can to help that child of God thrive, not just survive. The second thing is that rather than determine your ministries inside the church or in the Council, go out and knock on doors. Ask the community that your church is in what they need. Go build your ministry on the responses you get. There will be a real verified need and where that is the case I am sure the Lord will bless you with the resources to do the ministry. When this happens the ministry is to God’s children, exactly where our ministry should be.

We also got to stay with homeless people 6 nights (most of us don’t want to know how close we could be to losing our homes), we went to the symphony for MLK celebration, we went to Ebenezer Baptist (MLK’s home church) for the celebration service (2 hours) and it was great, that pastor can preach, we met with advocacy lawyers, church coalition group, Faith and the City, the Korean Lutheran Church and stayed with some of their students and ate seaweed soup for breakfast, stayed with City of Refuge and worked there for a day (www.cityofrefugeinc.com )check it out, we went to the Lutheran MLK celebration (2-2hour services in one day, wow), we met with Lutheran Services of Georgia about their refugee resettlement, we worked with LSG on MLK day with about 80 volunteers to break down 4 tons of rice into 2 lb bags, we went and helped a suburban church feed over 30 homeless in their neighborhood (there aren’t any homeless in the suburbs!), oh yes there are!, and we stopped by Candler Theological School at Emory and looked at the collection of Lutheran memorabilia including an original indulgence for building St. Peters.

This was quite a week. Seeing how difficult it is to survive once you are down and out and how the system really seems to help keep you there was not easy to see. Once you are homeless, it is really difficult to know what to do, to get any benefits. Did you know that you have to have an address to get benefits? How is that helping the homeless? If you have kids what do you do? There is also a huge population of people that are on the verge of being homeless, but still have an apartment. How do we keep them from falling into the homeless population? How do we help those that are homeless come back out? I know that there are a certain percentage of homeless that want to be that way, but the people we met do not and would do almost anything to get back into society. Then we have the undocumented workers in the country. We give them jobs that we don’t want to do and then we track them down. If we don’t want them here, don’t give them any work and they won’t come. If we are going to allow them to do the jobs that we don’t want then let them stay. Many of them have children that were born in the US and sending the parents out of the country would break the family up. We should not be doing that. What about the refugees that are going to be coming from Haiti? Did you know the Gov’t program for refugee resettlement gives $900 total for an agency to resettle a person? That is everything including apt, furniture, food, and transportation. By the time the apt is furnished and food stocked for them to eat there is less than $100 for them to last 90 days. 90 days is all the longer they stay on the grid. LSG keeps with them for 6 months, but that is still pretty tough in a new country where you don’t know the language or anything about it to be totally up to speed and have a decent job in 6 months is a very aggressive schedule. I don’t know how they do it.

On the family front this semester is starting out much tougher than last semester. Last semester everything seemed to fall into place for me to be here and the family in Sarasota. This semester doesn’t seem to be so easy. For the first time I am not sure that we are going to be able to pull off this me coming up to school and the family staying at home for 2 years. I may need to check into options. Luckily I had some great conversations recently with someone that let me know there is more than one way to accomplish this goal of ordination.

The heat is out in this end of the dorm for about 10 days. It hasn’t gotten too cold in here yet. The other side of the hall still has heat so we are leaving the doors open to allow some of it to head this way. Classes start on Monday.

God bless all of you,
Steve