Tall Monastic Guy: Re-fresh, Re-build, Re-New Orleans

June 12, 2007

Re-fresh, Re-build, Re-New Orleans

Wednesday night Angie and I will be traveling down to New Orleans (Angie's 1st trip!). Seven others from Adullam will be joining us on Thursday. This will be my 3rd trip to N.O. this year and I've shared with some of you the reasons why I feel led to be guiding these trips. On this particular one, this group from Adullam will be partenering with Habitat for Humanity and 1st Baptist of N.O. to build a home in Musician's Village. Musician's Village is a rebuilding initiative begun by Harry Connick Jr. in an attempt to bring the Jazz musician's back home after they scattered due to the "Big K" (Katrina).

Here's our schedule... Thursday night we'll eat dinner at Mike and Susan Brantley's. Last time Vic and I were there, Susan had alligator gumbo for us, so who knows what we'll be dining on this time. We'll be privelaged to have Mike give us the New Orleans overview and the Katrina story. We'll also be briefed by a Habitat for Humanity representative about our work days. Friday and Saturday we'll be up bright and early framing someone's home and getting as much done on it as we can in two days. Our evenings will be spent exploring the French Quarter and debriefing our days.

Please say a prayer for the 9 of us going down: Luke, Sam, Dan, Vic & Sara, Brandon & Lindley, Angie & Ryan. There's lots of emotion and spiritual thoughts that swirl during experiences like these.

Lastly, these trips are a bit of an investment to those going, so if anyone would ever desire to donate to these just shoot me an email and I'll give you direction with that.

Grace & Peace to you on this rainy Denver morning...

Posted at 08:13 AM in NOLA | Permalink

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Words make Worlds...

"It becomes so clear to me as I grow older that people who change, and keep changing, are the only people who grow up." -Richard Rohr
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
"Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be." -John Wooden
"Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody. Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody." - Henri Nouwen
"Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of spirituality begins where we are now in the mess of our lives." -Mike Yaconelli
"But that doesn’t mean community is easy. For everything in this world tries to pull us away from community, pushes us to choose ourselves over others, to choose independence over interdependence, to choose great things over small things, to choose going fast alone over going far together." -Shane Claiborne
"Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don’t do, and more in light of what they suffer." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." Albert Einstein
"Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Howard Thurman
"A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." -Dr. Martin Luther King
"Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful--- Christian community is the final apologetic." -Francis Schaefer
"It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools." Wendell Berry
"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than the particular country in which he was born." -Francois Fenelon
"Ministry cannot be about maintenance, but it is about gathering, about embrace, about welcoming home all sorts of and conditions of people; home is a place for mother tongue, of basic soul food, of old stories told and treasured, of being at ease, known by name, belonging without qualifying for membership." -Walter Brueggemann
"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get round to being the particular poet or particular monk that they are intended to be by God." "In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be." -Thomas Merton
"God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and God's been speaking through them ever since. So, if God chooses to speak through you don't think to highly of yourself." -Rich Mullins
"We must become holy not because we want to feel holy but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us." Mother Teresa
"I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self." Henri Nouwen