With These Two Hands I’ll Change the World

If you look close, you can often catch joy and sadness walking hand in hand.

Photo by Brendan Scott

I did anyway while on a ten-day mission trip in Guatemala. At a school in Xela, our team played crazy games like Zombie Tag, where the kids laughed and ran and mumbled, “Must eat brain, must eat brain.” In chapel services those same kids sang, “Sin has lost it’s power, Death has lost its sting, From the grave You’ve risen VICTORIOUSLY” at the tops of their lungs. Zombies, even pretend ones, singing about the ultimate anti-zombie, Jesus, was beautiful and hilarious. The kids listening with rapt attention when we told our stories about how God loved all of us was pure joy.

This was mingled with the sadness of watching street boys, ages nine or ten working, shining shoes on the square, or the little Mayan girls carrying their heavy burdens on their heads to work instead of to school. Or the blind man begging, or the two gringas wobbling down the street drunk at about 4 in the afternoon. Deep. Sadness. I wanted so to be able to tell them too of the love of God for them.

Photo by Eugene Scott

I noticed something else about joy and sadness (I have seen this before but always forget). Wealth and joy were not always hand in hand, nor were sadness and poverty. There they were together, wealth and poverty, sadness and joy arm-wrestling. The wealthy do not have a market on joy nor the poor on sadness.

Hurt, pain, worry cut across all lines, as does laughter and song.

I remembered then that our problems and our hopes are deeper than dollars can dig. Maybe that is why God does not simply throw money at us when we ask for help.

The poet and prophet Isaiah told his people in a time of deep poverty and sadness that God would one day “bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.”

As Ben Harper sings, God wants to use our two hands locked together, along with joy and sadness, to work this miraculous exchange of beauty for ashes for all of us.

Eugene C. Scott is most moved by being with people and seeing God in them. You can join the Living Spiritually community by following that blog and clicking here and liking the page. He is also co-pastor of The Neighborhood Church.

Love: The Secret Ingredient in Good Gravy and Making a Difference

By Michael Gallup

Michael Gallup and his daughter Mary Grace

I was listening to NPR on the way home from work the other day.  They were sharing a piece about soul-food.  In one of the interviews, a young man told of how he asked his granddaddy for his gumbo recipe, to which his granddaddy responded, “boy, there ain’t no recipe, now get in this kitchen and watch me make it.”  I could not help but smile, what a beautiful picture of what soul-food is all about.  Food for the soul must be born in the soul, not on an index card.

We’ve all seen this phenomenon first hand, that even when we follow aunt Betty’s recipe exactly, the results just aren’t quite the same.  We come up with excuses, blaming the altitude or the insufficient seasoning on our cast-iron skillet, but the only real excuse, and I really do believe this, is that it is missing the love.

When I go see my aunt Betty, she always makes me gravy and biscuits.  These are things of legends.  Every time either my brother or I are in Arkansas without the other, we will call each other up and rub it in that we had aunt Betty’s biscuits and gravy.  I have been eating this meal my whole life and yet I struggle to make gravy at all, let alone such wonderful grub as aunt Betty’s.  I’ve been watching her, trying to learn her secrets, but she always “eyeballs” the ingredients and evidently my eyeballs don’t work as well as hers.  Aunt Betty usually fusses over the thickness or saltiness, but no matter what, that is always some good gravy.  It is made with love, as she stirs with her wooden spoon, she gives herself to this act of creating because she loves me and you can literally taste it.

Perhaps it is this way with all our creative acts.  That if we try to recreate what another has done, no matter how good the original, the end result is simply left lacking.  This doesn’t mean we don’t learn from those before. No, we get in that kitchen and watch them work.  And we learn, if we are lucky, that the secret ingredient is not some exotic spice but a charitable heart, a passion to make the world a better place, even if only one biscuit at a time.  I am a witness that a single act of creating soul-food can change a person.

Although my aunt Betty never misses an opportunity to tell me she loves me, I hear her the loudest at the dinner table.  I taste the truth of these words in her gravy and it oh so sweet.  I only pray that I will be so brave when I put my hands to work, that I will not seek to imitate, but to love; and that is how I would best honor Aunt Betty.  Not by trying to recreate her food, but by giving myself to something in such a way, that perhaps it just might change the world, that it just might be real soul-food.

We welcome Michael Gallup as one of the “servers” at the Neighborhood Cafe. Michael will be periodically writing our Monday blog. Michael is a southern gentleman who wishes his current employer would see the error of their ways and let him grow a beard. He is a member of The Neighborhood Church (tnc3.org) and is attending Denver Seminary. He writes a blog at www.asprigofhope.blogspot.com