Tuesday started off well, just based on the fact that I did not have a headache. I got ready and headed over to school around 7:30. I was in charge of the breakfast clean-up crew all week, so getting to school by 8:00 was important so I could lend a hand in cleaning up breakfast. Breakfast ended at 8:15, and generally the vans were scheduled to leave at 8:45 or so, so it never left much time to clean up after 30+ people. I tried to get a jump on the dishes, usually beginning them at 8:00, and the kids generally were very good help, so it was not a bad chore.
After breakfast, I was to head out with Jim Gaul and his team of 7 students. I drove in my car and took a student with me, and pretty much I got lost in the same spot as I did last year – near Dart Avenue in Akron. I finally figured out where I went wrong (Dart has a very small left-hand turn section off of the exit that I was not aware of). So, my student and I got to the site about 20 minutes late. We were supposed to help out a free medical clinic, but when I got there, Jim informed me we had been turned away because they could not use teenaged help. Some wires got crossed somewhere. Jim jumped on his phone, and before long we headed over to the Front Porch, the church home of South Street Ministries.
South Street Ministries is the dream of a husband/wife team who felt led to minister in the poorest part of Akron. The moved into the neighborhood with a 20-year commitment to the neighborhood, and they have been there since 1997. They bought the old Croatian Center, which was for all intents and purposes a bar (several bars, actually – one in each room), and they converted the front of the building into a place of worship, one block away from the county jail. They reach a clientele that is varied and one that often feels uncomfortable in a “normal” church. They have ex-cons, crack addicts, transvestites, and more people that often get missed by mainline churches. They made a decision to keep the informal bar feel, so that it would not be so intimidating to people. Duane, the head of the ministry, described it as a halfway-house between the street and the church. They are doing very cool things there, and it seems to be doing a lot of good.
Anyway, we met up with Nate’s team of kids, and we were there to help the ministry clear out of the building all the old junk that had been there for years, including three bars (over two days). We distributed the kids around, and I finally settled in to managing the dumpster. Since you pay the removal company by the container, it is important to pack it well, so I was in charge of the dumpster. Talk about your Peter Principle in action.
We worked along all morning, and broke for lunch, and Duane told us about the ministry of South Side Church and the Front Porch. After lunch, Nate’s team left to go work on the church community garden at Nate’s church, and our team stayed to continue the clean-up. We spent much of the afternoon in the old kitchen trying to take down cabinets that were nailed into each other and into the concrete wall. They came down very hard, and we left at 3:00 with half of them still in place.
Once we got back to CVCA, I went for a six-mile run at Kendal Hills park. It turned out to be a poor decision. It was hot (82 degrees), and I had been on my feet all day. I walked a half mile of the last three miles of the run, and felt poorly for it. It turned out to be my only run of the week – I made a conscious decision to put Diakonos first and leave my running for a week so that I would have more energy for the work.
After I got back from my run and shower, we had a brief leaders’ meeting to debrief on how the day went. This turned out to be the only leaders’ meeting that I made it to – I probably missed more by showering at home. After the meeting was an excellent supper of zucchini and sausage pancakes along with really spicy lentils.
The official entertainment for the evening was to play games as groups, and to rotate those groups every 15 minutes. That was not much time to play a game, but it introduced kids to a lot of the odd games we bring on the trip. I was put in charge of Flux, a card game where the rules and the goals of the game are always changing. The kids were a bit confused at first, but they caught on and seemed to enjoy the wackiness of it.
We then had a time of worship, starting with singing some songs. The band this year was quite excellent – we had two guitar players, a drummer, a bass player, and a violin player. I enjoyed the songs very much.
Craig then briefly reviewed what he had spoken on the night before (Creation and “ought” – how things should be), and asked for examples of hints of that (or the opposite of how things are not as they ought to be) through what we had seen on the work sites. People brought out examples of how senior citizens were using their retirement to help feed and clothe their neighbors, how some saw child disabilities as a brokenness in the creation (not as things ought to be), how hundreds of families are in need at food banks, and more. Craig summed it up by pointing out that God brings redemptive purpose out of brokenness, and we can work alongside of that.
Craig then moved on from how the world ought to be to how it really is. It all resulted from the Fall, which resulted in sinfulness, rebellion, lawlessness and death. There is no life in sin – it is always ashes. We give ourselves over to idolatry, corruption, and deception. This results in separation from God, it hurts others and ourselves, and even creation itself is “groaning” under the brokenness of the fallen world.
Craig stressed that sin does not make creation bad – we can still see beauty in the world and in each other. We end up sensing how God made the world (“ought”), but we live in a world that tends to go the wrong way. Humans cannot solve all of our problems, because we end up trapped in sin or rebellion or deception. Jesus breaks through that and gives us the power to change, but we still must confront sin. Craig suggested that confession is a very useful tool to do this – to find a trusted someone to help you be honest with sin and to help you break free of it. When we share what we struggle with with a trusted friend, it breaks the stronghold that sin has on us.
We then broke into our small groups to pray about and to talk about confession. I encouraged my group to think about confession, but to not necessarily confess deep secrets to our group since you need to be cautions about whom you confess to – usually you want someone you can trust and rely on, and I did not want to force anyone to confess to a group that had only been together for one day. But we still managed to talk about confession and ways that it can help you in being a better follower of Jesus.
Once the group was done, I headed home at about 11:00 to get some sleep. It had been a busy little day.