This is Home

Once upon a time there was a lad with boyhood behind him and manhood close, who heard the call of the King to follow him into Enchanted City and do the work of the Kingdom. . . .

More than anything, Hero wants to be a King’s man and do the King’s work. Just this morning he heard the King speak: “It is time to begin the restoration of the Kingdom. I need a King’s man with a hero’s heart. Will you come?”

Hero does not want to leave the safety and peace of Great Park to return to the darkness of Enchanted City. But he knows he must answer the King’s call. What will protect him as he returns to that evil place to help in the restoration of the Kingdom?

Follow Hero on his quest, as he discovers that when one belongs to the Kingdom, he is never alone in the terrible places of the world.

~~~~~~

The sign next to the pink metal door reads “occupancy by more than 217 persons is unlawful.” Well, the good news is that we’ve never broken the law.

I’ve realized this summer just how humble my circumstances have become. Going to Kenya was glamorous. It was hot and uncomfortable and exhausting, but it was exciting. Short term missions make front-page news in Christian communities.

But I don’t live in a Christian community.

I don’t think too many people understand this. Even the Covenant students who are from Orlando are mainly from the north part, which is primarily more wealthy (and more white) than the newly-built south. Furthermore, the very community I live in used to be one of the “high places” where the Seminoles worshipped evil spirits. They used to sacrifice their children here.

Yikes. Not exactly Clapham.

There are some thriving churches here. We’re in the middle of four of them. One, the Methodist church, has the white rich because it is so liberal. The pastor doesn’t believe in hell.
The second is the catholic church–the only one for miles. Enough said.
The other two are Spanish-speaking Pentecostal churches from Puerto Rico. Their male and female pastors are pretty excited about building their own kingdom in Orlando.
There are a few other little community churches meeting in schools around my home. Two of them are doing all right–100-200 people isn’t bad at all. The rest–over a dozen–have come and gone. They died within 10 years of being born.

Of my neighbors, one is Catholic, one is SDA, one is agnostic, one is atheistic, and one is Hindu. We have a Christian neighbor three or four houses down, but I’m not really sure if they go to church.

So this place isn’t exactly receptive to Christianity. I’ve spent most of my life watching the ebb and flow of church attendance in my little ARP congregation. People who are committed and vibrant move out of Orlando–it’s a transient city. Others don’t move, they just dissapear. They smile nervously when they meet us in the grocery story and mumble something about how they’ve been meaning to get back to church. But they’re too busy golfing. After all, in entertainment city, you can golf at a different golf course every sunday for a year.

So I went to Kenya with seven students who go to large, vivacious churches and have grown up with the experience of Christian community, and realized that I really have no concept of what they’re talking about. And then I came home.

At first it was nice. I was so busy telling stories about Kenya, it felt like I was still there. Then I took my youth group up to a week of camp in NC. My favorite place on Earth, but this year it was different. I was seeing things through new eyes. I missed Covenant more.

And the kids started opening up with their brokenness. Out of the six kids I brought from my church, three had parents who were going through a divorce. Six kids. We fit in a minivan. I remember when we had two church buses and still sat on each other’s laps.

They are amazing kids. In the midst of the huge groups of 40+ that were there from other churches, ours stood out. Everyone was talking about the way they worshipped. Our kids are nitty-gritty. They talk during the sessions and they stay up late. But they love God. They worship like few other ARPs I know; whole-hearted, emotionally involved, and physically demonstrative. They can actually last through hours of Bible study. They pray out loud. They are alive and unashamedly so. I am proud of them.

I cried a lot that week. I felt weak and cursed my femininity. I’ve never before realized how fragile women are. Yes, the human race is frail. But girls can be broken so easily, and I was broken that week. I yelled at God and cried for hours and finally curled up under the trees on the soft green grass and knew grace.

God is the gentlest person I know. When I cried out and asked him why I was born a woman, he picked me up and turned me around. “Look,” he whispered, as I spent two nights staying up late with the girls in the group, talking about life and love and boys and eating popcorn and laughing and crying in a way no male leader could ever have. I overheard my friend Joe, who makes me burn with jealousy because he is a paid youth leader, saying, “the women in my church work with the girls in a way no man ever could.”

And when I came home, he showed me again. I went to visit my cousin for a couple days, and that night as we climbed in bed together and she told me her life story, I knew no male Christian could ever have the opportunity to listen and love the way I could. The next morning, I laughed and played with some missionary’s kids in south FL. Some guys have a way with kids, I know. But kids are one of my very feminine strengths.

After this, I hit rock bottom. My worship leader left our church to move to PA. I cried and again cursed the fact that I was a girl. I could never minister the way he could–oh, but I wanted to. And now my closest friend here–my main source of encouragement and fellowship–was in PA. Loneliness hit like a tsunami, wave after wave creating a twisted wreckage as it slammed into my heart. Added to that was the shame that I couldn’t get a job. It wasn’t really because I was inferior–I just refused to work on Sundays in a tourist market. My dad said God would honor me. I kept asking God when.

I tried to write a song about my cousin. I sat on the floor in my dad’s office with a guitar at one in the morning, and played a chord progression that was supposed to symbolize her pain, but really followed the progression of my summer from great to horrible. I tried writing lyrics and just broke down in tears again, remembering how I’d had to tell her that God only watched over his own. I played the chord progression through and tried singing my new lyrics to it, but instead I found myself singing, “O, the deep, deep love of Jesus,” and crying because it was a love my cousin didn’t know. I rested my head on the guitar and prayed for Christ to hold me.

I went crawling back to my old job–my humiliating job of running rides at Disney World. Yes, to everyone else it sounds really cool–and that’s because you haven’t seen it. I stand outside and open the gate and strap everyone’s seatbelts and close the gate and push the green button. Almost everyone else who works there is an immigrant who can’t get another job because they don’t speak English well enough. It’s one of those kinds of jobs.

My first day back was a ray of hope. I let two little black girls on the ride and closed the gate, and suddenly their mom exclaimed, “Katie! I recognize you from last year! How is school going for you?”
I told it was going well, and I had just returned from a trip to Kenya. Just returned was stretching it a bit, but I was embarrassed about the three weeks I spent looking for a job.
“Was it a mission?”
I told her it was.
“Are you born again?”
Yes ma’am, I said, echoing the words of my friend Winifred in Kenya. Jesus is my personal Savior.
“We are too!” She cried, and we talked for a good 15 minutes. She’s from Las Vegas, which is kinda like Orlando. Or so I would assume.
“I remember your smile, Katie,” she said, when I told her I was surprised she recognized me.
“It’s all Jesus,” I said shyly.
I heard him whispering again. “I love you.”

My phone rang all night. Almost a dozen Covenant friends called me. I talked to each for hours. My friend Alicia and I went out for lunch and talked about worship ministry and how much I missed Aaron and why everyone should go to Africa and my boyfriend and how much we both loved Jesus. It was another ray of hope.

I spent the last week home alone because my family was in Greenville. I worked 40 hours last week and work 46 next week. I’ve been counting the days until I go home–for Covenant is my real home now. I’m tired and lonely and broken and only starting to realize how really humble I am. I work at a job for Mexicans. I have very few friends. And now that I lead worship alone at church, I look out into the rows of blue plastic chairs lined up on the pink linoleum, and I see 25-30 faces every week.

Okay, so I know it’s the summer and attendance is always low, but my church is struggling. Our offering was in the hundreds last week. My sister teaches the sunday school class, I lead worship, my mom does the nursery, and my dad preaches. We have two elders, a piano player, a treasurer, and a hospitality coordinator. I tremble to think that we may see the fate of the dozen or so churches that have come and gone these past 15 years. Yes, we don’t break the law–but I would love to pack out that little rented school auditorium. To build a Christian community and see the little life that is there flourish and come to maturity. There are just so many obstacles. There is so much pain.

So I’ve been studying Lamentations this week, and I started to realize that Jeremiah knew what I was feeling. He too wept for a people that were dying–dying in a different way, and yet a way not so different. “I am the one who has seen the afflictions that come from the rod of the LORD’s anger. He has brought me into deep darkness, shutting out all light….How the gold has lost its luster! Even the finest gold has become dull. The sacred gemstones lie scattered in the streets! See how the precious children of Jerusalem, worth their weight in gold, are now treated like pots of clay. Even the jackals feed their young, but not my people Israel. They ignore their children’s cries, like the ostriches of the desert. The parched tongues of their little ones stick with thirst to the roofs of their mouths. The children cry for bread, but no one has any to give them. The people who once ate only the richest foods now beg in the streets for anything they can get. Those who once lived in palaces now search the garbage pits for food. The guilt of my people is greater than that of Sodom, where utter disaster struck in a moment with no one to help them. Our princes were once glowing with health; they were as clean as snow and as elegant as jewels. But now their faces are blacker than soot. No one even recognizes them. Their skin sticks to their bones; it is as dry and hard as wood. Those killed by the sword are far better off than those who die of hunger, wasting away for want of food. Tenderhearted women have cooked their own children and eaten them in order to survive the siege. But now the anger of the LORD is satisfied. His fiercest anger has now been poured out. He started a fire in Jerusalem that burned the city to its foundations.”

So my people are starving and dying because of their sin–but starving and dying for the word of God. Suffering because they have not chosen life. Like the Israelites, my people are enslaved to the world and their lives are wasting away. They bear so many burdens. And they come looking for hope.

So do I.

Today I stood before my tiny congregation and thought that they looked like a house church. I didn’t tell them that, I told them what I learned this summer. I didn’t really know what I had learned this summer until I started telling them. I read from Lamentations 3.

Lam 3:21-24, 31-33
“Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this:
The unfailing love of the LORD never ends! By his mercies we have been kept from complete destruction. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each day. I say to myself, “The LORD is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!” …For the Lord does not abandon anyone forever. Though he brings grief, he also shows compassion according to the greatness of his unfailing love.”

And we sang.

O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free!
Rolling as a mighty ocean
In its fullness over me!
Underneath me, all around me,
Is the current of Your love
Leading onward, leading homeward
To Your glorious rest above!

O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
Spread His praise from shore to shore,
How He loveth, ever loveth
Changeth never, nevermore
How He watches o’er His loved ones,
Died to call them all His own;
How for them He interceedeth,
Watcheth o’er them from the throne.

O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
Love of ev’ry love the best:
‘Tis an ocean vast of blessing,
‘Tis a haven sweet of rest.
O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
‘Tis a heav’n of heav’ns to me;
And it lifts me up to glory,
For it lifts me up to Thee.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I was 15 we had a youth pastor. He wasn’t paid, but he had us over to his house every wednesday night. He was an amazing illustrator. He would tell stories to explain whatever he was teaching us, and I like stories. They stick with me to this day.

One story kinda turned into a joke. He talked about fellowship, and how at Baptist potlucks in the south “fellowship” is always equated with carry-in dinners where southern housewives bring excellent homemade fried chicken. We coined the term “fried chicken fellowship” and finally shortened it to “fellowship” for our youth group name.

That was 5 years ago. Our youth pastor isn’t around any more–he got a paying job at another church. I can’t remember the last time I had fried chicken. But I’ve been wrestling with the concept of fellowship.

I was at a thrift store this summer when I hit the motherload. Someone who liked the same music I did (or perhaps strongly disliked my music?) had donated their entire music library. I gleefully dug through piles of CDs by Led Zepplin, the Beach Boys, and tons of Christian artists like Shane and Shane and Ginny Owens. I had to decide which ones to actually purchase, since the whole collection would be somewhere around $50, which, due to my not having a job at the time, was hard to come by. I put some back and then picked them up again. Music is my one shopping weakness. How to choose?

One CD, though, went straight into the cart and never moved. It was an early, out-of-print Caedmon’s Call CD called “Just don’t want coffee”. It had a song on it Aaron had always wanted me to play, one called “April Showers”. I went home and listened to the CD four times before going to bed. April Showers was my favorite.

Oh like April Showers on the slick cement
When I consider how our light is spent
Keeping the candles inside the cathedrals
Hold on tight, Don’t go into the night
So full of evil, evil

Rain rain don’t go away
Oh we need you this dry and dusty day
Rain rain don’t go away
Though some may say please go away

It immediately resonated with me because I live in the sunshine state. Sunshine is great–for a little while. The sun that warms the visitors burns the locals, leaving us cracked and parched. We’ve been burned by the tourism industry we live in, leaving our area spiritually dry and thirsty. My people need rain. How can a community survive without water?

We had to read a book by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and another one by Henri Nouwen, both about community, as training for RA. Both books were very good, but Bonhoeffer’s was really excellent. He has such an emphasis on grace. A community, he said, was founded on grace, not the people in the community who will fail and fall. Reading this, I began to re-evaluate my church and community in a new light.

I thought about this as my church hosted a potluck dinner two weeks ago. I ate and laughed and talked with my high school friends and took pictures as a young woman in our church opened presents for her new baby. But for a few moments I stood back and just watched. Around the room my people were talking, laughing, fellowshipping. Today, they were so joyful and full of life.

No one brought fried chicken, but I thought of it. I thought, maybe fellowship, maybe Christian community, is more like fried chicken then we realize. Maybe it is supposed to be messy and dirty and full of struggles; full of pain and sin and forgiveness, full of hurt and humiliation and brokenness; because community, rather than being something elevated and pure, is something that meets us where we are and is a fluid, moving organism that grows and struggles and changes from day to day.

So maybe Christian fellowship isn’t supposed to be pretty. Maybe part of the realness of it is in the fact that it is nitty-gritty and hard. My youth pastor said that messy Christianity, one that involves a deeper fellowship than potluck suppers, takes courage. It takes grace. It involves deep vulnerability. But, just like good ol’ southern fried chicken, it is finger-lickin’ good. We want to suck each flavor off our fingers and not miss a single taste.

Oh like April Showers on the slick cement
And the roads once straight have now become so bent
Weaving through the trees of vain security
Rounding ’round the hard rocks of hard morality

It came to mind when I got off work that saturday. I went straight to the home of a single mom in our church. She had recieved several letters about the state of her front yard, so my church had a workday at her house. When I arrived, several families were already there, and had torn out the weeds and were laying sod. I grabbed a rake.

Most of the people who were already there had tons of dirt under their fingernails. I garnered a couple of blisters by the end of the day. The sky was a depressing gray and every now and then thundered quietly. We were hurrying to finish before it rained.

I worked quietly. My heart was heavy. As I struggled with the weeds and tried to loosen the soil, God gently stirred up the ground of my heart. I listened to the other workers talk and laugh as they annihilated weeds and discussed how to arrange the flowers, and I realized something. These people were not just sharing their food. They were sharing their lives. The fact that over half the church had shown up to do yard work for one of the families spoke volumes to me. They truly cared for each other. If community is organic, than it must start small. I had been wrong. This community was not a large plant dying. It was a small plant growing.

I began to contemplate the books I had been reading, and realized, maybe fellowship is more like life than like worship, and that’s why it rests on grace. Maybe its essence is in the messiness; in the fact that each person is intimately involved in each others’ lives and therefore enters into the sin and dirt and grease and stickiness of the other. After all, isn’t that what Christ has done in our lives?

I had a friend in high school who left youth group because of the sinners within it. She missed the point. The focus of community can not be community. We can’t hold up “community” as an ideal to pursue, because then every failure within the community will shatter the dream. The dream is not community. We are the community. The dream is Christ. The dream is taking the candles outside the cathedral. The dream is rain and dirt and fried chicken and grace. If the focus is on having a community, the fellowship will collapse. But if the focus is Christ, the community will grow in grace.

So I realized I had to let my preconceived notions of Christian community go. I had to stop expecting the people I knew to “act like a community” (whatever that is) and allow Christ to grow his church the way he best saw fit. I needed to see the supremacy of grace and rest in it. Christ loves his people even more than I do.

I leaned on my rake and tilted my face to the gray sky. I felt a drop on my forehead. Everyone hurried to pour mulch and plant the last flowers, retreating to the garage to congratulate themselves on a job well done. And then it begain to rain, mixing with the dirt on my hands and washing my face. I licked my lips and tasted the drops. It tasted like community.

And I knew it was good.

The past can be like sidewalk chalk
If you will dance and pray for rain…

Rain rain don’t go away
We need you this dry and dusty day
Rain rain don’t go away
Though some may say please go away

Oh like April Showers
On a slick cement…