Chris and I meet regularly with some friends who minister in south MInneapolis and one of the topics we often discuss is how we’ve all made it over 35 years here in this context. Recently when we had dinner with a younger couple on the front end of their years working here in the city, I shared with them a couple of the reasons that we have been able to stay here serving Jesus, in spite of the setbacks and heartaches and sorrows we’ve been part of.
First of all, I think the biggest reason we’ve been able to stay is because we haven’t measured our success in the business terms of the world. American culture is just so focused on profits and success and markers of achievement and growth. If you work anywhere where things are hard and you are battling generational forces of destruction, you are not going to have lots of bright and shiny stories made for the movies, or rags to riches and brokenness to wholeness. If you need to be a bright and shiny success yourself, this life is not for you. We have chosen to measure our success in terms of love and of faithfulness–ever real commitment to living out the love of Jesus day by day and faithfulness to love and work with whoever and whatever God chooses to send our way.
Secondly, we have chosen to measure not by yardsticks of the world’s success, but by every tiny little bit of change, movement, self-awareness and growth we see in each person or in their family unit. I call those things my jewels. We see them. Chris and I discuss them. We celebrate them. We thank God for them. We marvel at even the tiniest movements that we see towards life and love and Jesus. I can get so much joy and encouragement from one little jewel that I will carry around in my heart for weeks.
I feel like these two pivotal principles were in play in our weeks leading up to Easter as we thought of various ways to celebrate the power of Jesus’ love and resurrection. We had a lovely gathering on Palm Sunday with a bunch of our grown up kids that have preschool children-5 young men raising families and one of our grown up girls who is raising her nephew. What a lovely celebration with these six families and what a joy to see the kind of parents they are! When we think of how some of them never had a father present to dry their tears or change their diapers, it is just a marvel to see how they care for their children with love and attention.
What a jewel. And imagine seeing young people you have known since they were children, now waving palm branches with their own children celebrating our beautiful Jesus and teaching their little ones songs Chris taught them when they were young.
Then, we had an Easter gathering for all our high school kids where we ate good food and Chris shared the Easter story. As Chris was teaching I looked across the group and considered how far some of these guys have come since fifth and sixth grade…a couple of them, by all rights, could be in detention or dead. Some, living through great tragedy in their families–the death of a parent, the incarceration of older siblings, abandonment by parents, they persevere. It is a privilege that I get to love them and so many of them love me back. In spite of hardships that are just too much to imagine, like the plants that flower and grow in the tiniest cracks in the sidewalk, these young men cling to life and every day we try to remind them that God is a God who is for THEM and FOR them and that Jesus’ love can help them flourish in a world that is so decidedly not for them.
I think of all of you faithful supporters, who have stuck with us all these years, helping us to stay faithful here and live out this magnificent call to preach good news to the captives and offer a vision of what God has for them when the world would keep them blind. I pray that Jesus would easter in you and that you also would be alive each day to the love and life Jesus has for you and the ways that you may live that out in the world around you.
Christ's Children Ministries 