Schedule change

David and I have changed our schedules around. This leaves me with larger periods of time to accomplish errands/tasks sans children, but somehow significantly less time to goof around at the computer.

Perhaps it is time to shut down this blog...

Church of the Servant King

We asked the intentional community we visited in North Portland to send us a copy of their covenant agreement.

Church of the Servant King -- Statement of Commitment
           
   We come together as single followers of our Lord and Savior, Jesus
Christ.  In response to the promptings of His Spirit we are determined
to seek first His kingdom, ordering our lives by its values and
submitting to His lordship through this local expression of His body.
By this statement we express our covenant with one another under the
lordship of Jesus Christ.
   It is our desire to live out life in listening response to His call.
Where He calls us to love one another, we shall, learning from Him and
from each other the are of loving.  Where He calls us to servanthood, we
shall humbly offer ourselves.  Where He urges us to become holy as He is
holy, we will abandon the false pursuits of the world and will receive
thankfully the correction of our sister and brother. We affirm that our
confession of Christ means that we will live out our discipleship in
union with others, that together we are His body, that the church is
God's tool for accomplishing His objective in the world. Together, we
wish to be a light to the world showing His love.
   Because of this and my desire to grow up into true servanthood,
recognizing that light is discovered only when I choose not to claim
life for myself, I give my life away, no longer living for me but living
for you.  I abandon my destiny to the Lord. Knowing His Spirit works
through His people, I share with you the control of that destiny. Short
of a violation of my conscience, as it is purified through the church, I
will defer to the voice of the church and its gifts as it speaks to my
life.  My commitment to you is that I will not seek to leave without a
call from God that has been confirmed by this body.  I trust that you
will honor me as part of your family and not take my offering lightly. 
   I accept you as my sisters and brothers and promise to cherish the
gift of our relationship. I will strive for our unity by praying for
you, helping you, serving you, and forgiving you. I ask you to care for
me, to encourage me to love and good works, to call me on when you see
me falling away, and to stand beside me in my struggle.
   Now, then, we are one body.  We are born of one Spirit and seek
strength from one source.  We shall be together for as long as God
allows. We rejoice in our unity, a gift of our Father.  And we go forth,
together, in His service.

Like ships in the night

We keep missing S when she comes by or calls and unfortunately, she doesn't seem to be receiving our emails and her phone isn't receiving our calls.

I am posting this here because she has this address and WE WOULD LOVE TO HAVE DINNER WITH HER ON THURSDAY, but I am at a loss for contacting her beyond just showing up at her house and taping a note to her door. Which I will do tomorrow if I haven't heard from her.

Back on the Hunt

Our house is again looking for a housemate. At our house meeting with the Salsbury Coordinator, B stated that upon further reflection, she was completely uncomfortable with the idea of opening up the vacant room in our house for people in crisis. She is also totally uncomfortable with the thought of a male housemate, so we are specifically looking for a single female.

Hopefully we will find some motivated single female soon!

Grace Period

David has been hired by JustWork to work 10 hours a week. This means that we can now apply to extend our visas for another year. I can look for a part-time job and we will still receive the child tax credit and our health insurance. Hallelujah!

Now, hopefully a part-time job will open up somewhere locally.

A Little Clarity

We just had dinner with K&T (our friends with the connections in Cincinnati). For the next two or more years they intend to stay here in Vancouver.

Cincinnati is "off".

Upon hearing this I was a little hurt at first. But after a few minutes an amazing weight lifted from my being. I will not be moving to Cincinnati in the near future. I (most likely) will not be living with K&T. There is some blessing in that. We can now continue to build our friendships in this light.

God is good.

Follow-up

The Salsbury Coordinator likes our idea for using the vacant room. She wants us to brainstorm a little more together to make certain that we are all on board and everyone is willing to take on some responsibility for the guests.

Another house meeting approacheth...

Feeling incompetant

Perhaps incompetant isn't the best word.

I am feeling frustrated because our big trip did not yield any direction for our lives. Yes, we want to live in some kind of intentional community. But we could do that just about anywhere, provided that we are with like-minded people. Cincinnati, Portland, Timbuktu (well, probably not overseas), it's all about as likely as anything else. Who knows. Maybe we are supposed to stay here in Vancouver? I used to feel fairly certain that we were supposed to return to the US, but I am filled with doubts and second guesses.

I am also feeling frustrated in our house. The physical structure of the house and the location of the house are not terribly condusive to raising little people. But then, perhaps I just want what I don't have.

My final frustration has been with our efforts to potty train our son. He just is not interested. At all. He doesn't like getting wet when he is just wearing underwear and pants, but his dislike of the wetness is not so strong that he is interested in using the toilet.

Sometimes I just feel so out of control, that I want to do something rediculously crazy in an attempt to establish some form of control over my life. But I know anything crazy that I might do would only result in more frustration. So I just have to let all of this go instead.

House Meeting

A couple of days ago we had a house meeting. We debriefed how we were feeling after S's move, what we learned from the experience, etc.

We also discussed the food budget (again), cooking schedule (again), and chores (again).

Now we have an empty room to fill. David had the idea that perhaps we could use the empty room for temporary housing for First Nations folk (since B & V have a lot of ties to the First Nations community). We would need to find funding to cover the rent of that room. We have run the idea past the Salsbury Community Society Coordinator, we shall see what she has to say.

Moving day approaches

S moves out the day after tomorrow. We will miss her terribly, but she plans to come to our house for dinner every Thursday, so we won't be totally out of touch.

I am sad she is moving.

Time to think and process

We have come back from our trip and I have had a little time to process my thoughts.

At the beginning of our trip we drove to Portland to visit my family. My brother was released from prison and I turned thirty. It was a joyous weekend. My whole family helped to move my brother into his new apartment. This was the first time that I have ever participated in a "group project" with my family. Usually, I am visiting during holidays, and we are all simply sitting around stuffing our faces with too much food. This was a new and pleasant experience.

While we were in Portland, we visited with some of the members of The Church of the Servant King. They are an intentional community in North Portland near St. Johns and the University of Portland. The members of the church either live in the community house where the church meets or they live within a five-minute walk of the community house. They do not share money completely with one another, but they do all contribute to a common bank account. This money is there for housing expenses and assisting any member who finds him/herself out of work or ill or short of funds in some other way. The members are committed to life together so much that no one member will simply leave the community for a better job. If a member is offerred a better/different job involving a move away from the community, then the entire community meets to discern God's will with that member. The founding members have been living together in this neighborhood in North Portland since 1990.

When we spoke, one of the members said that one thing they have learned is that successful, long-term, intentional communities are built on the members' commitment to each other. She said they have heard of many intentional communities that have lasted only a few years because the commitment was to a program or a particular sector of society and then, when the program fails or the demographic of the neighborhood changes, the community dissolves.

Both David and I immediately felt at ease with these people in this community. Our son, Peter, who is usually quite shy in new environments happily accepted the box of toys he was handed and left us to tour the community house without him. We left their community knowing that we will be visiting them again to continue to learn and observe.

We flew from Portland to Indianapolis and visited with our good friends, R & S, who live in Spencer. They are intrigued by the thought of intentional community, and would like to live more radically and more simply, but feel very much alone in this desire in their present location (in both the small town and the church they attend). R will be leaving his present position at the church they attend in about nine months, so they, like us, are in a period of discerning where they should be headed. I think we all feel that joining together in some way might be quite possible.

We drove from Spencer to Cincinnati for a weekend. Our good friends and next-door neighbors are from Cincinnati and have suggested a particular inner city neighborhood there as a possible location to move to and begin life together. This is the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood that I spoke of previously. David and I wanted to see it with our own eyes. We arranged to meet with Jack at his house for breakfast and prayer followed by a walking tour of Over-the Rhine.

We arrived at Jack's house at 9:30ish. We met two of his housemates and then met a neighbor of his who is renovating one of the brownstone-ish buildings across the street. They are turning that one building into two apartments and an office space. Then we hit the pavement. It was 95 degrees and the humidity was high. Jack had a story or at least some background on almost every building we passed. That made for a hot, sweaty, slow tour with much standing in what little shade we could find. I can now tell you some of the basic differences between Italian, Greek, and German architecture in Over-the-Rhine. I can also tell you the significance of the names of Liberty Street and Race Street. I also learned the two primary things one does in the mid-west with an abundance of corn. All thanks to Jack.

We stopped at the church Jack attends for an indoor break... ice water, restrooms, and a chance for David and I to sit while Peter and Lucy stretched their legs. Prince of Peace Lutheran Church is lovely, if quite run-down from years of not enough money to make repairs. Only 12 people meet there regularly now. Once Jack had finished photocopying the bulletin, we moved on toward lunch at Tucker's. After lunch, and six straight hours together, we made our way back to Jack's house and bid him farewell. Peter and Lucy were in great need of a nap and David and I were in great need of time to process all we had learned and observed.

Jack is an amazing person. He knows more about just about everything than anyone else I know (and I know a few real Renaissance folks). He also has a heart for the people in his neighborhood and is willing to do whatever difficult work needs to be done. We were blessed by his positive yet realistic attitude.

The next day we checked out Findlay Market before heading back to Spencer. There we found shopping as similar to the kind of shopping we do here in Vancouver as we have yet to find in the States. We left Cincinnati thinking that this could be a very possible location for an intentional community to live.

So we travelled all that way and have come to decide that we (at least David and the kids and I) could really move just about anywhere (except suburbia) and live in an intentional community. It's not so much the place or the program, it's who we will be committing ourselves to.