Observations: Day 1

After a 12+ hour trip which included passage through 7 states (three of which I'd never visited---Ohio, Pennsylvania and W. Virginia---), we arrived in N. Virginia yesterday afternoon. Over the course of the summer, I will be working here and will eventually learn to help create this as well as this, among other things.

After a day of work, I'm still a bit nervous but also very hopeful. I like the people I'll be working with and have been excited (already!) to see people hard at work for the sake of serving and improving the lives of others (which they do for the sake of the God they believe in). To have an opportunity to partner with others in earnest effort to both honor God and improve the lot of man is something I find both noble and humbling.

This summer will be, in many ways, a challenge. Not the least of these challenges presented itself to me today as I walked to and from work/the metro station at McPherson Square in downtown D.C. I will work this summer in the midst of important people, in the shadow of glass and steel and concrete erected for the purposes of punching clocks, making money, being important. In a diagonal line across from my building is a park filled with homeless men; in the metro station I will use every day is a makeshift home constructed using a tarp, various blankets and scraps of luggage, cardboard, etc. Items cast off by a consumption-driven world ready to move on and consume the next thing, having given little or no thought to the type of person who might retrieve and depend on their garbage.

I believe this summer will test a way of thought, a worldview I've held now for years. A view that says there must be duality in our approach to mending the world. There must be, as Dr. King once said so well, "a true revolution of values" which ensures "the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway...that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." Policy changes, advocacy, petitions, protests...these essential tools.

There must also be feet pounding asphalt, hands reaching out, coats placed on the shoulders of men and women whose shoulders ache for human kindness...policy alone doesn't change our cities, our park benches, our metro stations...our petitions must be married to our willingness to bring the Gospel to bear in a very real and tangible way.

This summer, it will be easy for me to do the first. I already find myself lacking when it comes to the second. My need for security, for comfort, for a sense of protection is overwhelming and, at times, sickening. It may take a while but I want my walks to work to begin and end with love for my fellow man, with compassion even if it's just in a look of kindness given, a small sacrifice that I still find hard to make. For me, a "true revolution of values" will likely mean a true revolution in the day-to-day and that's what my first real, heartfelt prayers of the summer are for.