#lindsey l.

[blackburnhouse-blog]

To Love Another Person...

(Spoiler alert-if you've never seen Les Miserables and intend to, I give away some crucial plot points in the last paragraph)

The first time I saw Les Miserables I was 13 years old.  I cried through the entire thing and bawled especially hard at Fantine's last line, "And remember, the truth that once was spoken...to love another person is to see the face of God."

Over Christmas break I watched the movie with my family (our fourth or fifth time seeing the play together) and as always cried through the entire thing.  At this point the play is so tied up with memories of family outings and Christmases that it would be impossible for me to evaluate it in any unbiased way, but one thing that has continued to surprise me over and over again as I've grown up are the beautiful ways the scenes of grace and forgiveness strengthen and deepen the narrative.  As my own concepts of grace and forgiveness have evolved, I've realized their incredible importance when we speak about love.

This line, "to love another person is to see the face of God" has popped up everywhere.  My former high school youth have it as their facebook statuses, college friends have tweeted it, and seminary friends have posted it on the walls of their bedrooms and offices.  I wonder if it would be so prevalent if people understood how truly radical this concept is.  If loving another person leads to a more intimate knowledge of God, then this love costs us something.

Unfortunately, the concept of "love" has become entangled with the concept of "niceness."  I was walking along King Street the other day when I was startled to hear a young man shout something at me.  I turned and looked at him, puzzled, and he repeated what he had yelled earlier.  "I love you!"  I realized he was part of a group of people shouting, I love you, to people as they walked down the street.  He quickly moved on to the person behind me, shouting, "I love you!" to them as well. 

I left that encounter feeling unsettled and uncomfortable and thinking, how could you possibly say, "I love you" to me?  You have no idea who I am, what I struggle with, where I find joy.  You know nothing of my story or my life.  In short, you know nothing that the people who do love me know about me.  He also clearly had no desire to engage me in order to learn these things.  The encounter reminded me of a group of people in my undergrad days who would hand out smiley face cookies on campus with an inspirational quote to provide a pick-me-up for whoever needed a nice gesture that day.

Now I am not so embittered to think that it is a terrible thing to hand out cookies as "random acts of niceness."  A small act to show a person that someone cares about them is not wrong or bad.  But "I love you" cannot be that act of niceness.  Shouting "I love you" to me cost that young man nothing (except maybe embarrassment if he ever understands how invasive he was being).  I am not interested in love that costs nothing.  More importantly, I don't think Jesus is interested in love that costs nothing.  When Christ asked the disciples to follow him, to be in relationship with him, he didn't say, "Will you be nice to me when I'm in town?"  He said, give up everything and follow me.

Christ's love costs something; something we try to emulate in intentional community.  It's so incredibly difficult because it's more than being a good roommate or being nice to each other, but saying to the person, I will not let you destroy yourself; I will not let you continue in unhealthy patterns.  This love isn't always comfortable and warm and gooey.  It's sometimes hard conversations about hard truths.  And it's also hand in hand with grace and forgiveness.  Loving another person, the way that God intended, means asking to be a part of their life in ways that only make sense if we engage people with grace and forgiveness; ways that say we are both going to mess up and we're going to call each other out, because we want to live deeper into who God created us to be.  This love doesn't call for surface perfection, but for permission to shine light on the deepest, most shameful parts of us because of a foundation of grace and forgiveness.  

So we cannot separate Fantine's line from the story of Valjean being forgiven by the Bishop he stole silverware from, from Valjean's forgiveness of Javert when he had the opportunity to kill him and even from Javert's suicide due to his rigid, black and white  faith that made no room for grace or forgiveness (In his eyes, once a criminal, always a criminal).  To do so would be to rob the story of the deep, painful and beautiful theology that forgiveness and grace provide a space for love that allows for failure and human brokenness.  To do so would be to forget the truth that once was spoken, "To love another person is to see the face of God."

Lindsey L.

[blackburnhouse-blog]

Rejoice

I've been so encouraged and surprised by the amount of creativity that's been going on in our blog from poems to photographs to stories about family and life.  In this third week of advent, the week of joy, we remember the way God reflects in our lives; the way the Holy Spirit empowers us to reflect God.  So as we say to each other, Rejoice, and again, we say rejoice, let us use the gifts we've been given to wonder at the coming King.  As Lewis Hyde puts it in his book, The Gift, "What is good, is given back."

Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice.

Lindsey L.

[blackburnhouse-blog]

From Venture Project to Mission

If it hasn't become clear already, language is an incredibly important part of the process of figuring out what the Blackburn House is.  Who it's for; what it does; where it finds it's source and being, etc.  Now I'll be the first to admit that this probably has something to do with the fact that my childhood dream, before I got this sudden and rather life-altering call to ministry, was to be an English Professor.  In some ways my call into ministry may have been a gift from God to academia.  I could have, quite possibly, been a very mean professor (some of my best-loved stuffed animals failed my rigorous final exams when I played "English Professor" growing up).  But language is an undeniably important part of discerning the currents that underlie our work.  

We figured this out last week in discussing our "venture projects."  Part of our grant is to execute these so -called "venture projects."  Now the word "venture" immediately overwhelms me.  Business stuff like venture projects, sustainability, etc, are not a part of my wheelhouse.  They're outside my knowledge base entirely.  Give me words, I'll craft you something, give me business ideas, I'll glaze over until you're done talking about business ideas.  

But there was a bigger problem with the language of "venture project" than just my own inadequacy.  We realized that the flow of these "venture ideas" was towards our house.  The idea was, 'how can we get money into the house, how can we support ourselves?  How can we become self-sufficient?'  The current began "out there" and ended with us.  We were the telos of this idea of "venture projects."  This realization made us take a step back and say, is this really what we want to do with our resources?

When I first took the job as Program Director of the house I greedily consumed every book, article, even tweet about intentional community.  I also annoyingly pestered every person I knew who had some knowledge base about intentional community.  After many of them graciously agreed to meet with me, I heard the same thing over and over and over again: Pray together, eat together and have a mission outside yourself.

Well, we've gotten to the point where we've finally figured out how to pray together and eat together (it only took us four months), but we're still in the process of figuring out our "mission together" piece.  Occasionally slow on the up-take, I was thinking of these things separately.  In my office I would say, alright, the next couple of pieces to the Blackburn House are our "mission outside ourselves" and our "venture projects."  It wasn't until this past week when one of the members of the house committee said, "maybe we shouldn't be focusing on how to get money into the house, and focus more on how we can better use the resources we have."

Oh, right.  This whole "venture project" thing, this whole, how do we make what we're doing mean something, can't have us as the end goal.  It can't be a current toward us.  It has to be a current out.  This idea of our "mission," that must be our venture project.  Being reminded of the ways our language directs our flow, we decided to call this project our "mission" instead.  As a group we came to the conclusion that Jesus would probably never say to us, "Why didn't you make more money?"  But could probably say to us, "Why did your garden lie fallow?  Why did your produce go bad?  Why didn't you use the ample space you had to invite people in, to feed people, to be with people, to do all those things I straight up told you to do?"

With that simple word change we changed the way the currents of our imagined work moved and changed completely our attitudes toward it.  We are encouraged and excited, with tons a paths open to us as we begin the difficult task of doing God's work in Todd; of being God's hands and feet, and of figuring out just how to orient the current that flows out of us, the hunger that envelopes this house and this congregation, to do what is good and right and joyful, to give thanks to God.

Lindsey L.

[blackburnhouse-blog]

Christmas Specials and Family Ties

Forgive me, I'm pulling double duty on this blog because my sermon for this week is on family and the advent season.  But I logged on today and saw all of the pictures of Lauren's family and listened to the stories my roommates told about their family thanksgivings: What they ate, what games they played, what uncle/grandmother/aunt made an inflammatory political/religious statement that got cousin x/mom/brother going off on a tirade.  And I thought about how important family was in this advent season and how important understanding those relationships are for understanding intentional living.

Stay with me.  Even in this time of the "it's all about family" Lifetime Movie Network Christmas specials, I will resist and avoid as much as possible the sort of sentimental family-oriented gunk that clogs up a lot of Church Christmas literature and worship.  A caveat and a confession: First a caveat, I love my family and, like a lot of people, think they're the best and greatest family in the world.  I also humbly confess that I've been known to watch a sappy Christmas Special, or 10.  In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find one I haven't seen.  I just think that anyone who spent the last week with their family, no matter how well-adjusted, knows that the picture perfect end to a Christmas special isn't how family really works.  Think: the whole family huddled together in one group hug, every problem solved, no ambiguous questions, while little Timmy tells big sister Tammy, "You'll always be my best friend!" 

We all know family is more complicated than that.

Growing up, my mom had a pillow her sister cross-stitched for her.  On it, it said, "Sisters are Friends God chooses for you."  For my sister and I that was probably true . . 40% of the time. Especially during our teenage years.  It often felt like, "Sisters are people God forces you to live with even though they steal your clothes and drop the blow dryer so it breaks and tell mom when you sneak in past curfew," and that was on a good day.  Sisters are friends God chooses for you, but sisters (and family) are also the people who know how to push your buttons, how to scare you to death with their choices, and, worst of all, how to hurt you irreparably.

But there is some truth to that pillow.  Because the thing about family is that it comes with this built-in commitment.  Your family is your family.  You don't have to like each other, but you're still family.  Even estranged family members are still family members.  And that's a beautiful albeit scary thing.  It's a way for us to see a glimpse, even if it's just a warped and twisted sliver of a glimpse, of God's commitment to us.

Intentional community is trying to tap into that kind of commitment.  The kind that says, "my intention here is not politesse.  My intention is not to have a Lifetime Movie Network group-hug ending.  If that happens, that's a beautiful by-product of what we're trying to accomplish.  My real intention is to commit to living together with you.  To admitting I am human and allowing you to be so as well.  My intention is to learn how to be in relationship with you, because I don't have any other choice."

Our real intention, our real, idealistic, pie-in-the-sky intention, is to show even the tiniest glimmer of the kind of reconciliation and love that God has promised to us.  And I think I prefer that to group hugs, anyway.

Lindsey L.

[blackburnhouse-blog]

The Zucchini...The Zucchini are Liquefying.

I popped into the kitchen to make dinner tonight and was met with a faint unpleasant smell.  Since we compost and have a lot of produce in our kitchen, odd smells aren't uncommon, but never fun.  So I ignored it and hoped the situation would resolve itself.  Which never, ever happens with kitchen smells. 

An hour later I returned to the kitchen to find the smell markedly worse.  Sighing, I finally admitted to myself that I would have to hunt down and take care of the kitchen smell.  I began walking around the kitchen sniffing things like some sort of rot-sniffing dog.  Finally I came upon our basket of about a thousand zucchini from our garden.  The smell was definitely located somewhere in the basket.  I reached in to pull the top zucchini off to find the culprit and, to my surprise, my hand went right through the zucchini skin, squirting a horrible smelling, brown liquid everywhere.  In my shock I yelled (to no one in particular, as I was the only one home), "The zucchini!  The zucchini are liquefying!"

Well, dang.  It's embarrassing to admit how often produce from our garden goes bad.  There's just so much of it.  We like to call our garden a "community garden" and, to be fair, we do share quite a lot of produce with App State students.  But in terms of being a place where the community of Todd gets produce, half the people we know here are farmers or have some sort of garden themselves.  So the need for produce from our community garden just isn't that obvious.  Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are places that would love to take our produce, we just haven't been able to connect with them yet. 

This is something we're figuring out as we go along.  The "felt needs" of the community.  Fresh produce just doesn't seem to be one of the pressing needs here.  These felt needs are things we can't anticipate and can only learn through the long slow process of immersing ourselves in Todd and hoping that people might trust us enough to share those with us and allow us to share ours with them.  Since we've only been here a few months, we have a long way to go, but I'm thankful to have the partners I have both in the house and the church, to walk with us.

I toyed with putting up a picture of the liquefied zucchini, but in the end decided against it.  Readers, you're welcome.

Lindsey L.