Our group, announced back here, has been meeting biweekly for a couple months now, so I thought I’d post a bit of an update. It’s real low key. As we’ve spent a little more time together, the general flow during an evening is growing more smooth vs. forced. Small talk flows easily. My kids are real comfortable with everyone. That sort of thing.
We eat (Further thanks to Dara for recommending Oasis Cafe on Tuesday!) and we talk. Last night we meandered thru a bunch of topics, including but by no means limited to:
- Sarah McLachlan’s World on Fire video and the way Americans are viewed abroad. What is the foreign take on our conspicuous wealth and consumerism? (Quick plug for The Gospel Experiment over at Waving or Drowning?
- Which is more important: right beliefs or right actions? I used this tongue-in-cheek Jewish proverb as a starting point (Sorry - I’ve lost the blog source.): “To be a good Jew you don’t have to believe in God, you just have to do what he says.”
- What does God value more, righteousness or honesty?
Feel free to weigh in on any of the above.
The action side of things has yet to really get kicked off. I’m okay with that for now; I want a certain relational foundation to our efforts. I was hoping to do a servant evangelism give away later this month: 9-volt batteries and reminder cards on the weekend of the Daylight Savings Time switch. This is going to prove to cost prohibitive, however, so I think I’ll move to the next idea.
Meet Greta and Sissy, our neighbors from the other end of the block. Greta is in her early sixties, and she lives with her aunt, Sissy, who is in her early eighties. They’ve been in the neighborhood for nearly thirty-five years, and I think Greta knows just about every person in a four block radius. Greta volunteers at an area senior center in the morning, and Sissy loves to garden. Her backyard is full of flowers and vegetables, and she spends a great deal of her time at a community garden in the area. Earlier this year Greta’s mom passed away after an extended battle with Alzheimer’s disease. To pile on to the situation, Greta has been in the hospital for the past two weeks with an infection.
Greta’s a fantastically nice lady, though I don’t think she’s ever lived on her own. Every day, when she gets home from volunteering, Greta walks up the block to chat with Kerri and another neighbor for an hour or so just before lunch time. Her loneliness is obvious, and she expresses a great deal of gratitude for Kerri’s friendship. This summer I’ve also taken to mowing their lawn whenever I mow my own. (Now if you knew how often I mowed, you’d see that really isn’t as big as it sounds. Nevertheless, i don’t see any reason why either of them should have to mow their own grass.)
My idea? Well, I imagine there are a few things around the house or yard that neither of them have been able to get around to doing. I don’t know exactly what, yet, but I hope a few of us in the group can get together and spend a Saturday doing whatever they can think of for us to do. We may lack skills, but hopefully we’ll make up for it with enthusiasm. If they don’t have anything we can do - or won’t let us do anything - then I hope they can point us in a direction where we can be of use.
Sounds like religion God would approve of to me.
