Busyness

My high school choir director always warned us in dramatic, foreboding tones about the dangers of getting too caught up in busyness that goes nowhere, whether in musical passages that he wanted us to make less funereal or in our outside-of-choir lives. And I have to say, I think I stumbled into a job that keeps me quite busy, but it all goes somewhere.

For instance, this past weekend, I was at a United Methodist Women annual meeting and met some of the most incredible women. Granted, more than one of them wanted to set me up with their grandsons, but that’s just semantics. I was blown away at how long they had dedicated themselves to ministering with low income and marginalized populations, whether it was making prayer shawls or UMCOR buckets or volunteering at Crossroads Urban Center or any number of causes they dedicated themselves to from the environment to domestic violence to undocumented workers. I very much want to be like these ladies when I grow up! I confess before I left I was sort of afraid it would be a few days of listening to talk about bunions or dentures but that was most certainly not the case! Though I did rather feel like I was about twelve years old when they would keep talking about “the young people” which did make me giggle!

I also had my first experience preaching. Before, it had been a general spiel where I outlined what the US-2 program is and what Crossroads is and what all I was doing. In the one on Sunday, I used Bible verses and told more of my personal decision-making process which led to being a US-2. I was horribly nervous, but I think it went well overall. I did not perpetrate any of my personal pet peeves for public speaking/sermon-making like apologizing for saying what you are about to say, going on for far too long with no real reason, telling irrelevant stories, shouting about how angry God is at people for doing something, or grinning while talking about a serious topic. Not to mention, people seemed to like what I had to say, though of course I have a long way to go before I become a smooth public speaker. The most surprising thing, (other than meeting a man who went to the exact same elementary school I did) was talking to a girl my age afterwards who told me I made her feel guilty because I was doing all this mission work and she was not. That was definitely not my point! But we had a good conversation about all of it so it all ended up right. Still can’t believe it, though.

Going to advocacy staff meeting today at Crossroads really made me feel like I have a lot of catching up to do in terms of city politics here in Salt Lake City. I didn’t know three fourths of what they were talking about, and the things I did recognize, I didn’t know all that much about. So I really need to get to reading up on local issues not only so these meetings make sense, but so I can know who to talk to on what issues and how they might respond. Thankfully, I have a lot of help with that here, I just need to take advantage of it. I am also taking advantage of living in a larger city because tomorrow, I am going to the City Library to hear Kathy Reichs (the lady who wrote Bones!) and this weekend, I am going to the Scottish Ceilidh at the Presbyterian Church near where I live. I am extremely excited about both of these events. I mean what could be cooler than forensic anthropology and tartan in the same week, no less!

 

Simplicity

I am currently struggling to write a sermon to deliver this coming Sunday about Risk Taking Mission and Service. I have the lectionary passage and the topic and my previous spiel about myself and the US-2 program to start with. Beyond that, I haven’t the foggiest idea about what to say. On the plus side, I quite like both of the lectionary passages (1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 and Matthew 22: 34-46, in case you were wondering) so I think I can work those in and have it make sense. I am just struggling with the fact that I am going to preach. To actual people. About Risk Taking Mission and Service. In less than a week.

Alright, I got the nervousness out for now. Now on to what I was actually going to talk about in this blog. Although it does sort of tie in, I suppose. I’ve started to realize that a lot of issues that seem extremely convoluted do not necessarily need to be. For instance, housing and homelessness. If governments have such a problem with homeless people sleeping in the parks, then how come they don’t provide viable alternatives to prevent the sort of desperation that leads to sleeping on park benches? If they want everyone to be gainfully employed, how come they support policies that ship jobs overseas and leave fewer opportunities for those seeking jobs? Maybe I am naive and do not know the ways of the world and maybe my political knowledge comes from watching Law and Order, but I do think these questions need to be asked until they are answered with sustainable action and homelessness is not just invisible but solved.

In addition, religion is another that is needlessly complicated. As the lectionary passage for this Sunday states, “Jesus replied: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” That is what Jesus tells us to do. Two sentences. All of the hundreds of commandments and books of law compressed into two almost terrifyingly simple sentences. So all we can do is…do. Go forth and love.

Well I covered politics and religion. Enough controversy for today. This has been a busy week or so and will continue to be busy until noonish Sunday when church is over. I went to my cousin’s wonderful wedding this past weekend in Ohio and had a marvelous time hanging out with my family and enjoying landscape that is not remotely desert-esque. I also worked the food pantry Monday morning and have been planning the monthly Coalition of Religious Communities meeting this Thursday. I am also going to the Rocky Mountain Annual Meeting of the United Methodist Women this weekend in Grand Junction, CO, which I think will be great. I just kind of hope that I won’t be the only under-thirty person there. We will just have to see. Well, I have meeting to get to now, so I will leave this here and continue my montage next week.

 

Learning Experiences

Since moving to Salt Lake City and coming to work at Crossroads, I have had more that one learning experience. Hopefully, I actually learn lessons from these experiences and don’t just file them away in the old brain box for future reference but never actually, you know, use them.

One example would be the couple of public speaking experiences I have done here. The first, I made exactly three notes on the church bulletin, did not practice, and gave a fairly mediocre talk during which I know I forgot at least three things to mention. The second talk I gave, I prepared a reasonably thorough outline of what I was going to say, ran through the talk before going, did not forget anything of note, and they laughed at my jokes and fed me lasagna. All in all, a successful outing.

Another learning experience would have to be the fairly in-depth tour my supervisor gave me of Salt Lake City last week. Everything I had heard of Salt Lake City before coming here tended to be along the lines of “it’s clean, the people are nice, the mountains are gorgeous, and there sure are a lot of Mormons out there.” Nothing to really indicate high levels of poverty. But I saw what are called inner courts: tiny streets cut into the center of the large city blocks that hold more houses than you could possibly imagine in these narrow strips of concrete than can barely hold one car at a time, much less two. As my supervisor said, you have to feel bad for pizza delivery guys who have to try and find these places. So I suppose I learned that poverty is definitely a reality in Salt Lake City, if perhaps a better-hidden one than in the Deep South.

I’m also learning a little bit as I go along about Community Organizing.  And yes, I am currently reading a book about it, but I am also attending meetings and listening and learning quite  lot of overlapping advice like :it’s all about relationships. Things that seem like no-brainers but that are absolutely crucial. As the guy who wrote the book I’m reading about it (Building Powerful Community Organizations by Michael Jacoby Brown for those curious enough to check it out) said, we are not selling toothpaste. To make an impact, face to face contact makes a much bigger and more lasting impression than fliers or even skywriting ever will (though I do wonder about the skywriting…). That is also something I definitely need to remember because I must say, emails are a lot quicker and easier than actually talking to people. But emails are also quicker and easier to delete.

Well, this is some of what I have learned so far and hopefully some of it will stick!

 

Meetings and Meeting People

Quite a lot of what I have done since I came here a month ago has been going to meetings where I have met people and meeting people with whom I later have meetings. Terribly confusing, I know, but that is the way I feel quite honestly. Especially with emailing people and then meeting them face to face so that I sort of know who they are, but have no idea what they look like. Or meeting a whole horde of people like at our Poverty Summit this past Saturday and then meeting them later and having them remember who I am while I vaguely nod along and, if I am lucky, get a sudden burst of memory and know who I am talking to. Otherwise, I tend to just keep nodding along vaguely and attempt to catalog their name and details to help me remember them, like whether or not they have bangs or a buzz cut or something silly like that. Thankfully, since I have been here a month, I tend to remember the names of at least two or three people at each meeting I go to, which makes learning the names of everyone else much more manageable.

On the whole, I kind of enjoy going to meetings as a chance to get out of the office and go to new and exciting buildings like The North Admin Tower (ha) and get out of the standard routine that generally involves typing emails to people, staring wistfully at the postcards on my bulletin board of London and/or the Van Gogh calendar, checking email, calling people to get them to come to our meetings or looking up some abbreviation that I have not come across before (DWS, ABAWD, SUA, TANF, UAH and yes, those are all real abbreviations used in the space of one meeting. This is why I look things up!). It’s also good to know who I have been emailing with. I can’t help but remember when I was waiting to be interviewed during Interview and Discernment Days for US-2 and overheard two very happy women exclaim “My email buddy! So good to finally meet you in person! How long have we been in contact, three years?” I would feel terrible if I emailed someone that frequently and never met them the whole time I was a US-2. I also end up learning much more than I thought I would going to meetings since everyone always portrays meetings as a horrific waste of time and dreadfully boring. So far, the ratio of meetings where I have thought “Oh my gosh, get me out of here” to “Huh, I never knew that. This is kind of interesting” has been pleasantly small. Granted, one of those meetings was at about 1 in the afternoon and I had not had lunch yet, so I think I can be forgiven for being a bit impatient during that one.

Anyways, it’s hard to believe I have actually been here in Salt Lake City and at Crossroads for a little over a month! But I must say, it’s a relief to have the first month behind me so that I feel a little less clueless. On the flip side, the honeymoon is over and things are starting to gear up with preparations for the Thanksgiving Turkey giveaway, speaking at churches, the legislative interim session, and ever more meetings on the docket for the coming weeks.