How to Pray

As I write this, Thursday afternoon, the LAUP students are reflecting on their summer, and will be over the next two days, until they leave Saturday afternoon.

Please pray for them over these next 48 hours:

-that God will clarify what he's been speaking to them about being good news to the poor
-that the Scripture and convictions they've received will go deep in the soil of their hearts
-that God's Spirit will lead them to creative application of the lessons of the summer
-that God will preserve and sustain what he's done in them, that it would bear fruit on their campuses, in our cities, and in their lives.

Thank you for being a part of this journey...I look forward to updating you once we've finished out with the students and taken our student and staff leaders on our three day retreat.

From Stone to Flesh

The Leighton Avenue team singing with neighborhood kids

I realized, this past Sunday as I met with the student leaders of the LAUP teams, that I have been seeing something I've never seen.

As expected, students have been giving themselves to the urban kids and families on their sites, they've been immersing themselves in their readings about God's heart for the poor, they've been embracing the challenge of living on a budget equivalent with their neighbors--they've been faithful to all of their responsibilities--but they haven't let it stop there.  They've elected to go above and beyond.

The Northwest Pasadena team has taken extra time to visit each of the families of the kids in their program and spend time with them.  The Dolores Mission team has decided to spend the night sleeping in the homeless shelter, get up at 4:30 am with the men, and shadow them on foot to experience a day of homelessness.  The Leighton Avenue team hosted a potluck party for the whole block, and had the kids they've been mentoring in the arts present their work in front of everyone.  The Homeboy Industries team has started a weekly "God investigation group" for the recovering gang members to interact over stories of Jesus from the Scripture.  The list goes on and on.

I have never heard of students taking this much initiative to give their whole hearts to the poor in the midst of what's already a rigorous schedule.  This pattern underscores one of the central themes of the summer, found in Ezekiel 36:26:

"A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh."

The transformation happening before me is nothing less than beautiful.  These students are different than they were one month ago.  Not only are they more full of love for the urban poor, but they are simultaneously becoming more joyful, more hopeful, and are experiencing personal healing.  They're not just surviving a summer in the inner city...for many it's been the most joyful season of their lives.

And yet is it any surprise that making space for the poor in our lives would transform us?  As the summer comes to a close, I am more aware than ever of the omnipresent gravitational pull of our culture to have us focus on ourselves:  for our hearts to harden, for our schedules to fill up, for the poor to drift from our awareness, for our love to shrivel.

The next two days, students will be reflecting on what God convicted them of this summer, and how they will commit to living differently.  As they consider how to use their time, their money, and their education to be good news to the poor, I feel moved to let God speak to me as well.

The LAUP student leaders praying for the end of the summer

The call to remember the poor is throughout the Bible from cover to cover.  As I witness the beauty of seeing hearts of stone become hearts of flesh, it is clear that this exhortation is meant not just to bless the poor, but is for our own spiritual health.

Please join me in praying that God will preserve the transformation that students have experienced, that they will be strengthened to stand by the commitments they make, and that they will be an inspiration to you and I, that we, ourselves, would be responsive to God call to us to live as good news to the poor.

The Beginning of Breakthrough

Students responding to God's call to give him their future

Just last Thursday we hit a transformational moment with the 85 LAUP participants.

As students spent the week studying Scripture and hearing teaching about money, something broke open inside their hearts.  As students approached the front of the room to symbolically offer their treasures to God, the concept of God’s love for the poor somehow went from a cerebral idea to a heartfelt challenge to which they needed to personally respond.  They began to seek the link between the poor families they are working each day and their own choices of career, lifestyle, and finances in the future.  Students gave God control of their dreams and plans in very specific ways.

I’ve never seen students this engaged with the challenge to live as good news to the poor this early in the summer...I can hardly wait to see how much God will do by the end!

Please pray with us that God will keep moving deeply in students' hearts:  that each and every student will wrestle with God's personal challenge to them to live as good news to the poor, and that they will sweetly, intimately, and specifically hear God's invitation closer to himself.

Poetry on Poverty

At the heart of LAUP is more than just helping students gain God's heart for the poor.  It also involves identifying the competing values already embedded within them through our culture.  We are helping students make choices out of a view of the world that's driven by the "survival of the fittest" to make space for a view of the world built on the principles of the Kingdom of God.

Sam Rickert working on poetry at the LAUP house

Last Thursday, at our first weekly LAUP gathering, one of the students from our artist team--Sam Rickert--shared a spoken-word poetry piece that captured the foundation that we've laid.  Reading it doesn't do it justice, but you'll still get the idea:

Americans fight hard for freedom, for individualism...let's look at where that's left us.

We love our individual independence, not realizing the isolation conseqence;

We hope to be a self-made man, which probably means a wealth-made man.

This business world lives on competition, so we push the weak down without condition;

We live with a sense of entitlement, though you won't find that in God's covenant.

Most Americans believe "God helps those who help themselves" is biblical, just shows our starvation of the scriptural.

See entitlement leads to love-malnutrition, with western churches dying as the fruition.

The American Dream promises opportunity, but often leads to egocentricity;

We are told "fake it till you make it", God says, "I'll take your mask and break it."

Basically this rhyme's about

not I but we,

about us not me; 

We must live in unity

if we will ever be a kingdom community,

and a generation with eyes to see

the sins of our culture.

Let renewal rain down

by our repentance give God his crown.

As you pray for us, please ask God to move powerfully in the short time we have with the LAUP students.  As our directors team has sought God, we have felt moved by God to recognize the urgency of what's happening in them:  though they have the rest of their lives to live, what happens in their hearts over this next month has a dramatic effect upon the trajectory of the rest of their lives.

LAUP's first week

The LAUP 2012 interns, discussing Luke

What a first week of LAUP we’ve had!

 
Starting with Jesus’ inaugural address in Luke 4—the Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor—we immersed students in God’s heart for the poor and the city, and challenged them to recognize the brokenness in our world.

The first day, after looking at economic and racial demographic information on the city of Los Angeles, all ninety of us went to Skid Row to let God turn statistics into people.  As we arrived, the brokenness and despair were palpable:  people passed out on the sidewalk, marijuana being smoked in public, and a smell of urine, trash, and neglect.  One of our female students, Maria, shared her difficulty in recognizing the Skid Row homeless as human, and recoiled from making any physical contact.  Yet by the end of a fifteen minute lunch, something had begun to change.  In saying goodbye, the homeless woman embraced her and gave her a kiss on the cheek…as she did, Maria later shared that she sensed God speaking to her, “You are both my daughters.”

Students discussing issues underneath the "web" of injustice

We also made a point to help students understand the complexity of urban issues.  Each time we discussed the brokenness in the city, students identified issues (unemployment, drug abuse, domestic violence, etc.) wrote them on posters, and hung them from the balcony of the church.  As they saw links between these issues—unemployment can lead to depression, which can lead to drug abuse, which can lead to prostitution—they tied yarn between the posters.  By the end of the week, our sessions were a parable for the true spiritual state of the city:  continually living under an oppressive web of interconnected issues of injustice.

We ended the week speaking about God’s coming Kingdom which has been bursting through into our world since Jesus came to earth.  As we worshiped and proclaimed God’s good news of healing and redemption, students cut each piece of yarn, one by one.

Pray with me that this will be more than a metaphor, but that students will let God’s love for the poor seep into their hearts, and that through their own lives, they will see his Kingdom coming and his will being done in the city, as it is in heaven.