Shalom is literally the reality of God’s kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy being expressed in your life.

I hate those who have a divided heart, but your law do I love. Psalm 119:119

So this verse is the Refrain for the Morning Lessons. And I talked to the AirBnB guy where I am staying, Farris Hussan, last night just before he left for his bedroom and his meditation time. And we talked about meditation and why he does it and why I do it, sort of, through my daily offices. And the one thing about Farris is that he does not have a divided heart, his life is one great big, He Who Hesitates Has Lost mantra.

So this born-in-the-United-States-but-whose-family-is-from-Iraq sixteen-year-old kid snuck out and flew to Bagdad to see for himself what the war was really like. And hopped on a bus for a hippie Rainbow gathering. And flew to Afghanistan to study the plight of women and street kids. And walked the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, which has the largest single concentration of Arab Muslims in North America with a big Star of David necklace and his school’s Jewish Club t-shirt just to see what it felt like. And he worked as a  Wall Street stock analyst for one of the biggest firms until he started his own hedge fund when he was twenty-two. He is all about investigative reporting. So he invites random people to come sleep on his couch while he composes music in the next room. And meditates.

On responsibility.

Danny Silk describes one of the pillars that hold up healthy relationships as that of responsibility. Responsibility is the opposite of a reaction. “Response-ability” is the capacity to face any situation and make powerful choices that are consistent with who you say you are. It is a refusal to run away from difficulties or any part of your life or reality that you happen to dislike.

And when I meditate on a divided heart, in the never-exactly-quiet clunking pipes and horn honks and traffic whistles of Manhattan pre-dawn, I notice some grievous hesitation. And may it not be so.

Dear LORD God Almighty, may my trust be in You, and You alone. May me heart rejoice in You, for in Your holy Name I have put my trust. Let Your loving-kindness, O LORD, be upon me as I have put my trust in You.

And may my heart be one.  

Waging war against the law of my mind

Search for the LORD and His strength; continually seek His face. Psalm 105:4

So although I am not reading quite as much as I had imagined on this thus far very loosely defined sabbatical, I did begin Keep Your Love On by Danny Silk that focuses on helping people build, strengthen and heal their relational connections in their family, in their work, with the guy walking down the street.  And the foundation that Silk builds upon is the idea of choice, based on God’s love for us, for me, in that He chose me. He chose to love me while I was still a squirming distracted sinner doing my best to hide from His gaze.

 “I choose you.” This is the foundation of true, lasting relationships. It is the foundation for God’s relationship with you. As Jesus declared to His disciples, “You did not choose Me, but I chose you...” Jesus chose you in the most difficult of circumstances. He chose you while you were in sin, while you were His enemy. You can be sure that His end of relationship with you does not depend upon your choice, but entirely upon His choice.

If all our relationships are based solely on our natural impulse to return liking for liking, then we’re going to have problems. Liking is a conditional state—it changes.

For example, when people get married, their vows are all about what they are going to do. “I will love you. I will protect you. I will serve you. I will be faithful to you, no matter what.

In order to be able to make and keep commitments like this—commitments to enduring, intimate relationships—you need to be a certain kind of person. You need to be a powerful person. Powerful people take responsibility for their lives and powerful people choose who they want to be with, what they are going to pursue in life, and how they are going to go after it.

And I sure know that all of this power does not come from within.

Search for the LORD and His strength; continually seek His face.  

                                                                                                                       

And I wrote the chorus from the closing song at church last night on my wrist with a fine line blue marker, so I wouldn’t forget my prayer: Illuminate the way.

And the sermon was an introduction to the book of Philippians, strong on historical details about two battles between Brutus and Octavius for all of us Julius Caesar teacher types and photos of ancient churches, but certainly not the traditional three-point sermon. But one point was enough this week’s meditation: Peace is the fruit of God’s grace.

And the Julius Caesar reference reminded me about the last time I was in New York City and Dre took me to a production in the Dumbo set in a women’s prison which quite honestly and without a doubt the most amazing artistic anything I have ever witnessed. And this week I head back to New York City for a quick pick-up-Uncle-Jim-who-isn’t-doing-so-well-and-bring-him-back-to-Tucson visit. And even though I am aware that New York City can be a lonely place to live, somehow it is a place that always reminds me of This Choice that The Everlasting God has made.

And this is what I wrote, just a year ago:

And the point of all this, besides writing it down before it floats out of my mind, is that I saw thousands and thousands of faces in just a few short days. Nameless to me. Neither here nor there. A quick glimpse and gone. 

Yet I basked each step of the way in the peaceful declaration of He is Mine. She is Mine. And the oft-repeated line of the essays, well there were several...Am I better than my worst moment? being one of them. But another is the truth, There but for the grace of God go I.

And as I bumped into loved ones all over these islands, I was reminded of our made-in-the-image-of-Godness.  And knowingness. As in the number of hairs on my head knowingness. Each and every soul. Even the ones with stories recorded in this book of abject brokenness.  We are all broken. We are all wretched.

And who am I to accuse? God himself declares us not guilty! Who, then, will condemn them? Not Christ Jesus, who died for us while we were yet sinners? 

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! Because of Him we have the hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

When we let this freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."

And as I get ready for NYC and do laundry and write down phone numbers and addresses and make carpooling arrangements for Jin Chang and rides to the airport for me, my prayer is May I be filled with Your strength. A powerful person.

And last week I watched Nicole teach her new class at a neighborhood middle school, a Language Arts class of exceptional education kids that has pretty much made a long string of substitute teachers feel powerless.

But man, I watched Nicole step into her class with power. And Silk pretty much describes her classroom management style: Powerful people do not try to control other people. They know it doesn’t work, and that it’s not their job. Their job is to control themselves.

As a result, they are able to consciously and deliberately create the environment they want to live in. They don’t try to get people to respect them; they create a respectful environment by showing respect. They deliberately set the standard for how they expect to be treated by they way they treat others. As they consistently act in responsible, respectful, and loving ways, it becomes clear that the only people who can get close to them are those who know how to respect, be responsible, and love well.

And when I modeled a little lesson plan on sensory language with paper folded into four boxes (with both a hotdog and hamburger fold) filled with specific setting details, at the very end I had the kiddos fold the paper back up into quarters and then fold the middle corner down into a triangle and then open it up again so that there was a little diamond right in the center of the graphic organizer. And I gave a little talk explaining about how all of the sensory specific details of what things looked like and sounded like and smelled like fit together to create a mood or tone.

And they were told to write a word in the center to describe the mood of their Language Arts class.

And every one of those kiddos, in each one of the classes, after a year of hapless substitute teachers and worksheets and only one week of Nicole and her paints and silks and lit candles, wrote words like “Happy,” and “Calm” and “Peaceful,” in the center of their papers.

Thus, dear LORD, my prayer for today, for this week, for ever, May I continually seek Your face, and may I likewise bring this peace as I bask in Your strength and Your grace each step of the way.

Free at last, free at last

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.  For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Romans 7:21-24

Wretched indeed. 

My four days in New York City were framed by a book that Max handed me the very first night, a book of essays handed to him his very first day on the job as a public defender in the Bronx. This book was gathered together as a response to the question posed to public defenders time and time again, enough so it becomes “that question,” a cliché, however sincere, offered up as pleasantry fodder at cocktail parties: How can you represent those people?

And the book is a compilation of answers from people who have paid the price, put in the long, non-billable hours seeking for redemptive humanity hidden in the lives of their clients, whom for the most part are guilty. We are all guilty. Just some of us were born into a life lacking social niceties and tenderness and resources and access and they land in the file folders of the public defenders.

And I cannot quite believe how much of New York City I crammed into the four days, two of which we spent squished up in filled to capacity with stand by only seats airplanes, drinking soda water with lime after soda water with lime. 

And I wandered the neighborhood of upper class Brooklyn Heights with adorable trick-or-treaters dressed up as dangling jellyfish or Sherlock Holmes with cheerful parents hauling them around in wagons and running strollers past equally cheerful jack-o-lanterns and stringy while cotton strands. 

And I fell asleep in a beautiful bed overlooking the sparkly lit-up Hudson River with the window cracked open for fresh almost-sea breezes and savored cup after cup of freshly ground organic and free trade coffee. 

And brunch with Uncle Jim and who of all people, my angel brother Scott, at “the grandiose Machiavelli (which) is like visiting a museum of Italian food — complete with long-winded exhibition catalogs. Reams of paper arrive with the menu, bearing tales of the muralist who decorated the walls, the ceramist who designed the plates, the coloratura soprano who even now is singing into your ear,” catty-corner from Jim’s apartment and pretty much where he eats breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, guaranteed a friendly smile in this rushing-quickly-past city. And better here than family-style meals in some sort of bleak group home with an endless soundtrack. 

And Jincheng and I made the great trek across the Brooklyn Bridge, through Wall Street, Chinatown, Little Italy and at last striding up Fifth Avenue into Niketown, five-stories of hype and energy and power where he outfitted himself for today’s high school basketball try-outs. Jincheng cannot really match my stride when I get going.

And  home again, home again, jiggity-jig, to roast chicken and potatoes and apple pie, all handcrafted by Andrea-home-from-work and dinner with Ali Rawaf. Ali ever-so-gracious and just a weary of the full bore nature of life in the city, but can I say how wonderful it was to see him in this beautiful, but barely wider than a hallway apartment with fourteen-foot ceilings and everything exactly in its place apartment? 

And an early morning walk with Andrea, along the brand new park with just-turning leaves of every single color that is bright against the blue blue sky draped by the Bridge on one side and the Statue on the other. After dropping ol’ Jingcheng off with directions to the hop-on, hop-off bus at Times Square, but he just went to the candy store. 

The beat goes on. Julius Caesar in the Dumbo set in a women’s prison which quite honestly and without a doubt the most amazing artistic anything I have ever witnessed. Maybe even including David in Florence. Guacamole and margaritas with Janice and Michael, in town for the great race. Janice from Mexico, who joined in with the dust and peacocks and dirty-faced urchins for a never-to-be-forgotten year, here once again, within an arm’s embrace. Dinner with Steve and Max and Andrea at a little just-off-the-path Argentina place. Which sort of seamlessly rolled into bagels and lox brunch with the extended family, one of whom could speak Chinese with Jincheng, overlooking the Hudson, except for another Uncle Jim moment at Starbucks and a kiss good-bye. And reading through the entirety of the Sunday edition of the New York Times with a roomful of happy silent family and then one last race down Broadway to catch the M60 for La Guardia. After a loooooong delay because of the NYC marathon we somehow managed to slide into our seats just after last call before they shut the door.

Whew. 

And the point of all this, besides writing it down before it floats out of my mind, is that I saw thousands and thousands of faces in just a few short days. Nameless to me. Neither here nor there. A quick glimpse and gone. 

Yet I basked each step of the way in the peaceful declaration of He is Mine. She is Mine. And the oft-repeated line of the essays, well there were several...Am I better than my worst moment? being one of them. But another is the truth, There but for the grace of God go I.

And as I bumped into loved ones all over these islands, I was reminded of our made-in-the-image-of-Godness.  And knowingness. As in the number of hairs on my head knowingness. Each and every soul. Even the ones with stories recorded in this book of abject brokenness.  We are all broken. We are all wretched.

And who am I to accuse? God himself declares us not guilty! Who, then, will condemn them? Not Christ Jesus, who died for us while we were yet sinners? 

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! Because of Him we have the hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

When we let this freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."

Thank God Almighty.