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spacebrat311
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« Reply #2 on: August 13, 2010, 09:23:34 PM » |
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I thought you all deserved an update.
We have been moved into our new living situation now for about two months. Our house consists of Simon and I, two of our female friends from APU, one of our theology professors, and his wife. In about a week or so, we expect the professor's parents to join us as well. So for the count, that's four 22-year-olds, two approximately 60-year-olds, and two approximately 90-year-olds.
We have moved into the professor's home. When we started dreaming all this, it was just the four then-college-students, but we heard through the grapevine (facebook) that our professor was hoping to do something similar and it made a lot of sense to join together.
This presents the first challenge, and the first specific prayer that I would like to ask you pholks for. We now live in a gated community. While this is not ideal for anyone in the house except the professor's wife, she is in a fragile enough state emotionally that it may be years, and may be never, before it would even be possible to talk about moving to a lower income community. This is not necessarily a fatal flaw. I think it is still possible for us to make our life as a house very directly about the poor (something more direct than volunteering at a soup kitchen or something) even where we are. It just will take a lot more hard work and a lot more creativity. And prayer. So if you would keep us in your prayers for that, that would be great.
Another challenge: One of the two females our age is moving out. She became busier and busier with work, and felt like it made increasingly less sense to be part of the house when she couldn't devote the time it would take to actually BE part of the house. There is no ill will here or anything, we wish her the best and she is one of our closest friends, so we plan to see her regularly, so prayer for both her and us in navigating this transition would be helpful.
Just so you all have an update on the kinds of things we're doing as a house we are:
-Gardening. We have a small garden in our back yard where we are growing food, and we are also taking time to volunteer with a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in an attempt to encourage various kinds of food-related justice.
-Sharing of our abundance. Simon works at Starbucks during the day and a bar at night, so he generates a lot of take-home items since he has made it clear to both employers that he is not ok with waste. We get a large bag of Starbucks sandwiches and pastries every time he closes and several tens of pounds of coffee grounds per week, which are extremely good for composting, as well as recyclable bottles from the bar. Finding places for this abundance to go has become an activity of its own. Since we are connected with several other companion houses (as the local Christian intentional houses have taken to calling themselves) in the area, we tend to distribute the Starbucks sandwiches there, while the pastries are usually brought to be served at church on Sundays. We take the coffee grounds to the CSA and other gardens we can find. We have a couple of houseless friends who live in a van in the Ralph's parking lot off of Social Security checks and recycling money, so we attempt to bring them any cash-value recyclables we have built up whenever we go over to hang out with them.
-Praying. We have morning and evening prayers at 8AM and 10PM everyday, and the plan is to begin having a more structured liturgy as a house on Sundays that culminates in the Eucharist. We are also continually thinking about what it might mean for the life of our house itself to be a prayer. If everyone can make it to morning prayer on a given day, then we also read and discuss a chapter in the book of Acts. We do each chapter a few times before moving on, as we hope to move through the book slowly and thoughtfully.
Thanks for all the prayers so far, and I'll continue keeping everybody in the loop.
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