Taking in Reality...the First Days of LAUP

We’re one week into LAUP and I’m already in awe of God’s work…the stage is set for something very significant. Since last Sunday, the 19th, we’ve been meeting with the students daily for the purpose of training them for service in the inner city and giving them a spiritual lens through which to understand their summer.

We launched LAUP by offering the narrative of the Bible as an alternative to our 21st century American culture understanding about truth, meaning, and reality. Much like when the nation of Israel lived in Babylonian exile, American Christians are beginning to be more shaped by our surrounding context than we are shaping it, often just as caught up in materialism, consumerism, and ambition as our secular neighbors. To counter this, we shared the overarching story of scripture: things were not always this way. We told the story of Genesis and had students capture how their hearts yearn for the beauty, peace, and trust of the Garden of Eden through painting white tiles. The tiles were beautiful and the mood was sweet.

But, we continued, humanity didn’t submit to the boundaries of the garden. As we chose to defy God’s authority, brokenness entered the world, from the murder of Abel by Cain all the way through the world we live in today. “Not only is our world broken,” I (Scott) challenged, “but we ourselves are participant in that brokenness.” As I said this I walked over to our tiles and pulled mine down from the board and placed it on the podium in front of me. As the gasps punctuated the room, I raised the hammer I had in my hand, and with each confession of my own participation in damaging the world, I struck my beautifully painted tile. As the tile shattered into more and more broken pieces, I poured them into a bin, and invited students to reflect on their own participation in damaging our world. The next fifteen minutes was a powerful time of taking in the reality of our world, the sharp staccato of steady hammer blows shattering tile adding a wave of grief with each hearing. The underlying spiritual realities of our world were beginning to set in.

But as the mission of LAUP is to engage urban poverty unto transformation, a theoretical understanding of brokenness wasn’t enough.

The following morning we took a walk down skid row. Starting near little Tokyo, and working our way through the financial district at 5th and Flower, we looped back down 7th street as we headed back the the East. As we turned the corner onto San Julian, time suddenly stopped. Life felt like it was moving in slow motion as we walked the two blocks from 7th Street to 5th http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifStreet, seeing hundreds of homeless men and women living in abject despair. The numbers of people, the tents on sidewalks, the absence of cars driving down the street—all in the middle of the day—were other-worldly. Having walked straight from the corporate culture of lunch in the financial district brought a contrast that made the brokenness of our world all the more vivid, and the inequity that our world is so used to all the more repulsive.

We returned to our session and discussed the experience. As we used the lens of Genesis to interpret our world and ourselves, students felt the ache for divine rescue in a new way. It was with this kind of God-informed sobriety that we continued taking in the story of God’s response to the brokenness of our world, and the invitation to us to participate in its redemption.

If you'd like to be praying for LAUP specifically, please see the calendar of topics here...we'd love prayer for each topic each week!