1. Pick up garbage. If the Cheese Puffs bag in the holly bush is bothering me, — like, really, really — I throw it out myself.
2. Baby-talk barking dogs. Instead of getting huffy and looking up the Animal Control Hot Line (1-888-4LA-PET1 for Jefferson Park) I baby-talk my hood’s ferocious canines like they ain’t so tough.
3. Say, “Hi,” to people on the sidewalk. Even with my fear of unwanted solicitations I challenge myself to do at least this. From experience I know that if someone wants to holler at you, they will even if I don’t make eye-contact or speak.
4. Call 311. If there  is a mattress on the sidewalk (it’s been there for a month) or a dead cat, or a couple fighting in the street (yes, it’s happened), you can call 311. As long as you’re patient enough to get on the line with an operator, you can report non-emergency complaints.
5. Take photos. Okay, don’t be too obvious about it — you don’t want to look like a cop — but I find the lens of a camera can help me really see my street: nice stuff and bad.

What are some good starter tactics you’ve used to feel like a part of your neighborhood?

(Subscribe to this blog or read more.)

Of course, I see that as a challenge, right?

So I decided before I’m thirty I have to become certain things. That way I’m not stuck with a milanesa (inferior) personality till I die, and thus ensuring all the twenty-something-year-olds at my church will still have me over for their vegan, communal dinners when I’m an old outrageous church lady.

By the time I turn thirty, I will be a person who…

• Doesn’t raise her voice and stays neutral in conflict.
• Takes time to accomplish things she is proud of even if it means being alone.
• Makes do just fine without (ie. models simple living).
• Is not neurotic or depressive or sneaky.
• Makes friends with strangers.
• Can ask personal questions.

How about you? Got any items for your list?

I’m sure that as artists, we can all grow in our imagery lexicon to eventually express ourselves in less archetypal ways. But till then, I am still going to make fun of us. So here, in no particular order, are the most popular images in urban ministry.

In addition, I would like to include the following modifications on the list.

I think one disadvantage to being highly educated middle-class folks is that we are fed lots of information on the right way to do things and encouraged to solve problems. Once you get into the classroom or out on the street, you know how to diagnose the problem kids, the abusive homes, the under-resourced, the challenged neighbors and pupils around you.

But that’s where your training and talent stops.

Even if you could prescribe a treatment (or even when you try to) the patients don’t believe they have a problem and they certainly don’t get their prescription filled or take to heart your admonishments to get in shape and eat right.

I’ll stop right now with that metaphor. Basically, we come into the inner city to fix it and then find no one here already seems to care about the problems we do.

But I’m convinced more and more that importance of contemplation and personal devotion is not so much to pray our neighbors out of their situation, as it is to learn to detach ourselves from expectations, education and self-centered projections.

Is the end goal of urban ministry not to accomplish something systematic, but rather to learn to love who we would normally dislike? And not to learn to like them by our own standards, but to loose the choke-hold of standards from “the least of these” altogether? What tremendous grace we need for that — and what hope for the grace to come.

What do you think? What is the “point” if any?

• Road trips.
• Being in the desert.
• Under- and un-employment.
• Nature.
• Reunions and reminders of old teachings.
• Making home in unexpected places and with unforeseeable people.

Working at GEDCO. We got the new Photoshop. It was a big day!

Coworkers at GEDCO. Gotta love ‘em.

Ah, my humble abode.

This is what I was painting about.

The Poppleton House – spent a lot of time here!

Learned to drive!… Finally!

Some unfinished art.

Oh, Baltimore!

Riding the bus… bleh.

Art club with Maria.

Ha! Roommate making crazy face. Friend/driving-instructor-extraordinaire.

Roomie love!

Ah, some sweet people.

Visiting old friend… with new baby.

Fam!

First of many photos of roads stretching out before me.

Babies! And roomies. And Intervarsity reunions.

Unexpectedly lovely moments in Baltimore. From Fed Hill.

Rep.

Trip to NYC!

Borrowed some friends. Had plenty this trip.

Ah, Intervarsity’s Baltimore Urban Project hosted at our house. Go BUPpies!

My trip to LA. This is the first photo I took of the city after deciding to live there.
Has church and plants, major metaphor, no?

Downtown LA from Chinatown. I busied myself here waiting to see Krista.

Illinois. Road trip. Moving to LA!

Brianna, my road buddy with the faithful endurance I needed to make it there in one piece.

Driving Grandma’s car. Oklahoma.

The Grand Canyon, Arizona. Beautiful!

Desert.

Visited Exposition Rose Garden when I first got to LA.
I still gotthere all the time to smell the blooms.

First of two Trek weddings I attended this year. You can see some of the folks who would remind me why I’m doing all this. They are my inspiration!

An amazing meal with the La Salle ladies, my manger in LA

The LA Power Tour. And my friend Regina who introduced me to the Galleria in Koreatown

Two of the La Salle ladies y yo.

New roomies, Corissa and Marzipan.

New roomie, Karen, with Totoro hat — the cartoon that unites us all.

Utah to see Dad. Gettin’ back to the Mormon roots (but not really.)

Painting of Utah. It captured the scenery I’d seen so much of and I still work from it’s style.

Marzipan was my only company way too much of the time.
I’m starting to look like him.

Cancún made me re-think my stagnancy and superficial attachment to urban ministry.

Maaaa!

A nursery tucked away under the 10 overpass. Love things like this.

This photo represents learning Korean and the importance of misshapen animals in my household.

This is the last photo I took in 2009.
I snapped this dirty cat on my car just before
leaving on another road trip!

I had one definitive moment of sheer joy driving back to LA along the 5 (somewhere near Carlsbad.) The sun was setting over the ocean and there was a mountain and fields and water all lit up in gold along the road. It was so vibrant and open. I had to sigh.

I suppose I should have expected to be happy. It just took awhile with all the uncertainty and responsibilities creeping up. I didn’t realize under all that I was actually feeling free and happy. This weekend we attended the wedding of another illustrious and amazing Trek alum. Something about it created a sort of retreat / meditative break where I realized I’m at a great place in life.

When I decided to move to California and during the ensuing months of frustration and scrambling to survive I felt selfish. Like my motives were so escapist and my spiritual motives so lacking that I was distancing myself from the call of God (like how Jonah would have felt if he ever made it to the south of Spain.) I forgot there was a vision calling me out here, and maybe God could use it.

Now I see more than ever that there is grace for personal choice, and once again I have an inkling of the potential there is out here for me to do the work of an urban minister. More than that, there is a lifting of the heaviness and seriousness implied in that label.

The reasons why are fleeting, but I am left refreshed after this road trip to Texas.

Below, enjoy photographic evidence that I am making friends in LA, and that I am having delightful noodle dishes.

Friendies.

A small No. 1, with rare beef. Oh boy.

A friend from NYC recommended I get Vietnamese-style coffee as soon as I could. Here it is! Well, you can’t see it exactly. But coffee is filtering through grounds in the top, and will eventually be stirred with condensed milk waiting expectantly in the mug.

I think “Thai Tea Orange” should be a crayon color.

We made short work of it.