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May 28 - July 7, 2020
the relief it must give the homeowners is incalculable.
The book of Jeremiah was written to a devastated people, people who struggled mightily to reconcile their faith in a living God with the suffering they experienced as their world crumbled and they became the marginalized in a society built on power and wealth.
seek the peace and prosperity of the city that you were exiled to by God. To imagine a new future out of the ashes of the old.
Seeking peace in exile
gentrification almost always takes place on top of someone else’s loss.”
Gentrification causes loss. Pursuit of affluence hurting bothers
waiting until the local schools have a more acceptable diversity ratio before sending your kids there. It’s capitalizing on what’s best for you and yours while continuing to disinvest in those communities
who the good news of the American Dream is good for.
Who's Dream is it?
the ones with children longing for a play structure or a green space to run around, walk by signs that proclaim that one day it will all be made new.
I am forever being given things by people who can be perceived as poor: food mostly but sometimes money, sometimes long, sad, or strange stories, sometimes hugs, and sometimes green tea with hints of cardamom or ginger.
don’t know how to be grateful in a world where I was taught that I was the one to give to those in need. But
Receiving from those in poverty
Shame is the whisper not that what you have done was wrong but that you, at your very core, are wrong.
Shame lies that YOU are flawed
shame is unhelpful. I should know because I experience quite a bit of it. And no matter how much I wallow in shame, it doesn’t actually make the world a better place for my neighbors.
Shame helps no one
She is generous because she has been in need.
suppose I deposited that money in our bank. I don’t remember because I try hard not to think about it.
not only missed out on Jesus’ message but actively responded in ways that were angry, defensive, depressed, and eventually violent.
the words can guide us back home.”
And I knew without a shadow of a doubt: Jesus would have been laughing with us.
the lonely path of the free
My neighbors saved me from myself and from a culture that taught me that at age nineteen I had all the right answers to the mysterious, consuming, burning love of God.
Sved from culture that lies about grasping all there is to know about god in an easy, absolute way
my role as the captor with intentions of gold.
Opressor with good intentions
We are never as autonomous as we would like to believe; someone usually pays for our freedoms,
I have a friend like you, she told me. He started off small: trying not to buy anything with excess packaging, bicycling to work to cut down on carbon emissions. Now, she told me, looking me straight in the eye, now he refuses to buy toilet paper. She paused for a moment. He wipes his ass with his own hand, she said, as if to herself. She shook her head and went back to painting.
Wipes ass with own hand
tired of trying to pretend I was good, that I could control the chaos of the world with my small actions. But the problem was, I didn’t know how to stop.
Pretending to be good
My individualism grew in me a classic savior complex: a desperate longing to be of use, coupled with an inability to listen, love, or be transformed by others, especially those I wanted to help.
Why did it need hundreds of volunteers, most of them White and middle class, to come and do the work of maintaining a pleasing appearance once a decade?
What exactly does it mean to love a neighborhood, to adopt it, to help it, to fix it, when you wouldn’t actually ever move into it?
Adopting a neighbourhood you wouldn't live in
my own value was to live with my neighbors in mind, and that included sending my kids to the same school as they did.
Neighbourhood School
we already have a lot of great families, and we’re all working hard together here. If you want to join us, you’re more than welcome.
I’m tired of talking about intent. Instead, I want to talk about impact. I want to talk about what happens when we all choose what we believe is best for ourselves or for our children in a world that’s set up for some people to exploit and benefit from inequality.
Impact vs intent. Doing whats "best" for our families in a society built for inequality
integration through the court system, we would never have known how well it works for all. The results were plain: it raised both scores and graduation rates for Black children, and it wasn’t detrimental to White children,
people just want what is best for their kids. They want to give them the freedom to explore. They want them to get a Christian education. They are worried about godless public schools. They want to make sure their kids grow up with their values.
Terms undetgirded with racism
prioritize individual benefits over the collective flourishing of a community.
We are all experimenting with our children, all the time.
Someone’s kids have to attend the worst school in your city. In your mind whose kids should that be?
Tough question
most of them trusted the system and took it at its word.
excellence and ensuring equal access.”2 Some of my neighbors believed in the myth. They believed
It means you only want to love it in a certain way, a way that keeps the world as it fundamentally is,
Together, these children of God are building each other up into the kind of neighbors Jesus envisioned. The ones who have been taught to see differently than the empire sees. The
It’s one of the only places in our entire city that treats these precious children as if they are worthy of being invested in. It’s one of the only spaces in our neighborhood where anyone, regardless of income, race, able-bodiedness, or religion will be served to the best of the school’s ability.
Striving For and believing in equity
Because of my relationships with people who live on the outskirts of the American Dream, I’ve had the privilege of having my values laid bare before me.
our values about education are strongly influenced by our beliefs about the importance of autonomy versus community.
Education For autonomy or community
what matters even more than the superimposition of adult symbols is how a person’s inner life finally puts together the alphabet and numbers of his outer life?
Moral development
his numbers for the final count at Buchenwald or the specifics of a brand-new bridge.
whatever values they might claim to espouse (character formation, socialization, community building) are eclipsed by their actual motivation: achievement and success as defined by a number of variables:
what matters most is not what we say we value to our children but how we act.
I do not want what is best for my children—at least not the way best is defined by the upwardly mobile White middle class. I think about how “wild and free” is currently a new catchphrase of the unschooling
Not wanting the besf for our children
Because we don’t have community centers and few public parks, the schools are our lifeline to community:
making myself responsible for the flourishing of my neighbors.
calmed and restrained by a life where my own liberation is bound up in the flourishing of all.
Freedom in others flourishing
if God is love, then God must also be a perpetual wound, a weeping mother, ever attendant at the funerals of those who die in disgrace and ignominy.
if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Our liberation is connected
