Last weekend as the rain poured down and my roomie and I waited at a bus stop, we met a lady who shared her story with us. She freely shared stories of being a nurse and loving the elderly she served each day. She had worked jobs in every field available, including hard farm work that never ceased. She missed her daughter who no longer wants anything to do with her. She hated waiting at the bus stop, but today she decided to go to church. Her fingers were gnarled from a life of hard labor and little rest.
On the same bus, I let a man with a cart containing his life's possessions have my seat up front. As I sat down in my new seat, he handed me a pink flower from his cart, smiled, and thanked me for letting him sit down.
A resident and dear friend at Treasure House told me that she hated people looking at her feet. I asked her why and she told me it was because they were ugly. I gave her a puzzled look and told her that I didn't really agree. She responded in saying that her feet were ugly because they were tired - they were battered and bruised. Her feet carried the weight of her burdens and a life of pain she had lived for so many years. Her feet were ugly because they carried her through too many ugly situations that caused too much pain. And her feet were tired. They were tired from walking, crawling, and struggling to keep going each day.
Treasure House is a unique place. The three houses where Open Door Ministries now resides used to be havens of sex and drugs. The main office building was once a strip club and the women who worked there lived in the three houses as prostitutes. The block of houses was condemned and in utter ruins. Jeff Johnson had a vision to restore the houses and create ministries for broken women in them. Now the women at each house are a reflection of the process that went on in the physical homes years ago - a process of transforming brokenness and pain into healing and restoration.
I've spent hours sipping lattes in cozy coffee shops. I've curled up in the corner of a bookstore, reading, writing, and people-watching. I've sat on many street benches, waiting for a bus to come. I've met so many people...sooo many people. And in all the chaos of Denver, I find peace, and restlessness, love and hate, condemned homes in the projects and million dollar houses in the suburbs. I spend time at Starbucks and on street corners. I love both the noise and the calm. The rain pours the same hour the sun shines. My life is filled with paradoxes - side by side, together. And I think that's how it was meant to be. We need each other. We have different stories, different cultures, different views of God...and they crave each other. I feel comfortable in my own skin here. I feel like all aspects of who I am are celebrated...I'm a girl from South Korea, raised in Iowa and here in Denver...and I'm learning what that might mean. I'm learning what it is to be made in the image of God, beautifully and uniquely. There isn't an "us" and "them" here. We're together. We're all made in the image of God. We break bread together...whether that's a McFlurry or piece of fried chicken...it's sacred.
In class, we've talked about so many things I wish I could tell you all...it's really good stuff. The best class..and the hardest class to sit through was about lament. We talked about the lost art of lament, which is the poetry of truth-telling. Here are some things to ponder:
The first condition of healing is to bring the pain and suffering into view. -Kathleen M. O'Conner
Covert despair and repressed hopelessness characterizes the spiritual condition of North American culture. Unlike despair of poor and afflicted around the globe who know too well of their true condition, the despair of the dominant culture of North America is a denied despair, not merely hidden by wealth and power but forcibly refused. -Douglas John Hall
When God must be praised at all times, prayer becomes a lie, a cover-up, and a warrant for the status quo. -Walter Brueggemann
If you're not being transformed by your pain, you're transmitting it. -Richard Rohr
If one cannot question God, to whom does one direct the questions? -S. E. Balentine
We talked about how we try and mask our pain, afraid that it reveals a weakness about us. We're taught that God is in control and so the pain was a part of God's plan...yet we fail to properly mourn and grieve a loss, afraid that it compromises our knowledge of God's sovereignty. When we don't allow suffering, we have an inability to articulate or accept our own suffering - as well as an inability to enter imaginatively into the suffering of others. Christ invited us to lament - to cry out to God and be real with him. David writes in Psalms "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" While Christ is on the cross, he cries out the same words - "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He lamented.
And so, at the end of class...we lamented.
How long O Lord, how long?
How long will you keep your people in bondage to their past,
afraid to move into the future?
How long will your children continue to be slaves -
slaves to addiction, fear, money, drugs, sex?
How long will the lady at the bus have to keep working?
How long will the man on the bus have to keep walking?
How long will our feet be ugly and tired from carrying us through too many hard places?
How long will we hide our pain?
Lord, let your people free.
Let your children have freedom from their captivity
and liberation from their fear.
Lord, we're weary. Restore us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr-AhzqfRDg
