Currently Listening So Far from Home By Brave Saint Saturn Under Bridges see related

Yesterday while walking,
Beneath an overpass,
I saw the figure of Jesus,
Standing barefoot on broken glass.
His beard was graying,
The smell of urine filled the air,
Asking if I had some change,
Anything that I could spare.

Emaciated,
His shaking fists balled up,
Influenza and pneumonia,
Begging God to take his cup.
So different from his pictures,
Breathing air through yellowed tubes,
Jesus Christ, dying of AIDS,
Can look right through you.

And all have hated,
Crucified and walked away,
The Savior of the prostitutes,
Drunkards, rapists, and the gays.

Under bridges,
With hands raised,
From the ghettos they praise his name.
Broke and crippled in the dark of night,
Raise your voices to Jesus Christ,
Hallelujah.

- Brave Saint Saturn. So Far From Home.  Under Bridges.

this song is incredibly powerful to me.  i was listening to in on my way home from work this past Sunday.  while i was driving i was thinking about a lot.  things my girls had told me that night.  abuse issues that needed to be addressed.  case plan issues that would be affected by the other issues.  and my heart was broken.  hearing my girls talk about being molested and abused kills me.  so as i was driving home i was thinking about all of this.  and this song came on my ipod. i have always loved this song.  since the first time i heard it i have just LOVED it.  to me it embodies a large part of what the church should be doing.  we should be loving others.  loving people like those mentioned in the song.  the homeless.  the AIDS victims.  the prostitutes.  the alcoholics.  the gays.  these are people that Christ loves.  people He wants us to love too.  Christ died to atone for sin.  all sin. that includes prostitutes and gays.  it includes businessmen and social workers.  it includes pastors and pedophiles.  in the church today there seems to be some sort of aversion to the elements of society that are marginalized.  the elements that people would prefer to forget.  imagine in a homeless man walked into your church. he would obviously stink.  probably of alcohol and urine.  under arm odor and ass.  his teeth would most likely be rotten and he would be absolutely filthy from head to toe.  say he comes in and sits in the back row of your church.  he enters into worship and honestly worships God.  how would people in your congregation respond?  would they see the face of Christ?  would they love him?  would they speak to him and offer this man assitance?  there are some churches that would do just that.  they would love this homeless man.  clothe him and feed him and allow him to clean his body. they may even give him a place to stay or help him find a shelter. i think that most churches would probably just ignore him though.  i think they would allow him to worship and at the end of the service they would wish and hope that he walked out the door never to return.  i understand that mentality.  i used to have it.  i also understand that not everyone is equipped to handle a stinky rotten toothed homeless man.  but someone should show the man Christ's love.  that is what this song is about.  it is about seeing the face of Christ in every person on earth.  seeing His face in the homeless.  in the gay man dying from AIDS.  in the pedophile.  in the rapist.  it is about knowing that as Christians we don't condone everything that people do. but we can condemn the sin and love the sinner.  we can tell someone that they are doing something wrong and love them at the same time.  as Christians we are commanded to love the sinner.  sometimes thats hard.  i know that.  its hard for me to love the boys that come into my program that are child molesters.  it is hard for me to love the boys that come in and have abused or neglected or just ignored their children.  it is hard for me to love the girls that come in and put their own lives above their children or put their boyfriends lives above their children  but i strive to do it.  and i don't mean to toot my own horn.  because i am no better than anyone else.  in fact i am probably worse than most of you reading this.  but i try.  God loves those who are rejected by everyone.  in matthew 25 there is a story about the sheep and goats.  Christ lets the sheep into the Kingdom of Heaven because they gave Him water and food and clothing when He was in need.  when they ask when they did these things Christ responds that whatever they did to the least of these they did to Him.  the goats are rejected for not doing this.  serving the people on the fringes of society is at the core of the gospel.  it is what Christ wants us to do.

so as i was driving home in my care listening to this song and crying from my broken heart Christ came and comforted me.  it felt good to cry.  it felt good to know that i care about my girls enough that i can cry for them.  because no one ever has before.  and they need someone to cry for them.  so i will leave you with this.  find the song and listen to it if you can because its AMAZING. and i want to challenge you to go and spend some time with the homeless.  buy a homeless guy lunch and eat with him.  volunteer at a shelter or food kitchen.  be a mentor to a kid for Big Brothers, Big Sisters.  do something.  as a Christian you are commanded to spread Christs love.  we most often think that this means witnessing to people.  and that is part of it.  but the bigger part is doing something.  showing people that they are loved by you and also loved by Christ.

PS - this post is a bit more preachy than i intended at the beginning.... Sorry about that.

do you ever walk through a place a just feel sad for no real reason?  tonight i decided to actually take the hour long break i am allowed to have at work.  the reason for this was that the casino floors in atlantic city have been closed.  i wanted to see what they looked like totally void of people.  the reason for this is you can go into any casino in ac at any time of day and find the floors full of people.  5:00 am full.  10:00 pm full.  so after i looked at the empty floors i walked through to the boardwalk.  it was a foggy and slightly rainy night tonight.  i went over and bought myself an ice cream cone and decided to wander out onto steel pier.  steel pier is a little pier that juts out into the ocean and contains games and little carny rides.   wandered about and looked at the tourists and the workers and the games and prizes and rides.  and it all just seemed so sad.  i don't know why.  it just made me sad.  i suppose it had to do with the fact the some people are ok with spending their measly time off from work at such an offensively dull place.  part of it was the brash glaring lights of the signs.  and part of it was the workers begging people to help support them over loud speakers and microphones.  whoring their voices out for money they need but can't seem to earn.  the whole set up just seemed so so sad.  eventually i couldn't stand it and left to go look at the casino again.

generally speaking i hate the casinos in ac.  they suck in old people and take all their money with slot machines.  they suck in young people and take all their money with exciting table games like craps and poker.  when i walk through casinos all i can think about it how fraudulent the entire operation seems to be.  it is blatant greed and excess vomited out for the entire world to gawk at.  casinos are obscene places to me.  don't get me wrong though.  i do visit them and occasionally spend money in them.  this does not however make them any less obscene to me.  but when i walked through today the casino had a different feel.  the feel of loss and hardship.  a lot of my kids get jobs in the casinos.  it is easy to get hired and generally pays pretty well.  a large portion of the working and poor classes of south jersey work in the casinos.  they are all out of a job right now.  they are sitting at home making no money watching their bills pile up.  and i know this has only been going on for a day.  but think.  if you make $800 in a week and you need $750 of that to live and you lose one day of work you are fucked.  and that is what is happening in ac right now.

atlantic city is a depressing place.  it is covered in spiritual darkness and consumed by greed.  if you never get a chance to see it be grateful.

so its been awhile since i have posted anything up here.  i have been busy with work and trying to find a place to live.  i have reached a point where i can finally afford to move out of my parents house.  so a friend of mine and i are looking to move to the beach.  which should be incredible.  i am excited about it.  providing my room mate figures out what he is doing.  work is going well.  i still love it.  even though they made me spend an hour cleaning chalk graffiti off of the wall and sidewalk the other day.  that was a pain in the ass.  but i really do love my job.  i promise.

now to change the subject.  i am reading a book called the promise.  it is a follow up book to the chosen.  i suggest that you go out and purchase both of these books and read them.  the promise has two main themes.one is a boy named michael and his psycological problems.  the second is the tremendous split that occured in american judeism after the second world war.  jews from europe came to america to escape the torment and memories of the holocaust.  when they arrived they were incredibly conservative.  they rejected a large ammount of modern jewish scholarship because they felt that it demeaned the Bible.  the porblem with this was that they were rejecting good critical scholarship that helped clarify and defend the Bible.  this caused alot of dischord in the jewish community.  it was eventually resolved but as i was reading on the bus the other day i began thinking about modern christianity.  for a long time now i have voiced my opinion that modern christianity is heading down a dangerous road.  we are closing ourselves off from culture and trying our best to ignore the world and focus on Jesus in spite of the fact the Jesus told us to go out and serve the world.  as i thought about it i began to try to remember how many sermons have heard in a church on social issues.  in the past 10 years or so i can only remember one.  and it was just a month ago.  i have attended a number of churches in the past 10 years.  and none of them address social issues.  they ignore the homeless.  they don't care about the needy.  churches build huge buildings for themselves and grow to be obscenely large and ignore those around them.  modern christianity has heard Christ say, "be in the world but not of it."  however, modern christianity has focused so intensely on the part about not being of the world that they aren't in the world either.  we have been very effective in not being of the world.  we hold up our anti abortion signs and vote for george bush and tow the republican line.  we harras those whose oppinions are differant than ours and blame 9/11 on the muslims and gays.  we have been incredibly effective at not bieng of the world.  but in doing so we have taken ourselves out of it as well.  and when we take ourselves out of the world we redeer ourselves impotent.  no one on earth is going to listen to a christian that has sealed themselves off from the rest of society.  i am a christian and i try my hardest to avoid other christians that do that.  they can't have any kind of interesting conversation.  they have nothing to talk about because they aren't a part of society.  these are the people that tell me i don't love God and that i am not a true christian.  they tell me this because when i vote abortion and gay marriage aren't key issues.  they are non-issues.  they tell me this because i think more money should be spent to help the poor.  more should be done to address homelessness and poverty in america.  i support the welfare system when it is utilized properly.  i support government support for social service programs (the reason i do this is that the church won't do anything about it so i think the government should).  i am accused of being a liberal democrat non-christian.  all because of my opinion on two or three issues.  why can't modern christianity look beyond abortion?  why are we so hung up on that.  sure i think abortion on demand for no reason i something i don't like.  do i think we should get rid of it?  not really.  it would just cause more problems then it would solve and besides that it is virtually impossible to get the supreme court to overturn its own decsion.  because of that opinion i am not a christian and don't love God? bullshit.  i love God.  i show this love by giving it away to others where i work.  i pour love into my girls because i get that love from God.  i work with the homeless.  i follow God's desire for christians to serve the poor.  how can you tell me i am not a christian?  because i smoke and curse and drink?  bullshit.  i am tired of being labeled a non christian because of bullshit reasons and i wish men like pat buchanan and jerry fallwell and dr dobson would just go away.  they make me look like an ass to the rest of the planet because of how stupid they are and then they make me look evil to christians by condemning thost who are pro choice and those who drink and smoke and cuss.  why can't they just go away and leave the rest of us alone....

I hope that no American will waste his franchise and throw away his vote by voting either for me or against me solely on account of my religious affiliation. It is not relevant.

-John F. Kennedy

think about that next time you vote.

frustration

i have become increasingly frustrated with many things recently.  one of them is the current government here in the us of a.  i don't want to come off as one of those stupid and ill informed people who just bitches about how awful President Bush is, so i will try to avoid that.  my frustration is really more with the fact that we have involved ourselves in a conflict that has wasted some much life.  in all honesty the american casualties in this war are far lower than ever in our history.  the loss of life has mainly been sustained by the people if Iraq.  so many of them have died in the invasion, the insurgency battles, being mistaken for some one else, and in the suicide bombings.  it pains me to see that happen.  i understand the neccesity to free people from oppression however i have a hard time thinking that war is the best way to do that.  anyway.  its has happened.  it will continue on for years and there isn't much i can do about it other than to pray to God that none of my friends will die on the burning desert sand of Iraq.

i am also frustrated with my county and state.  i recently realized that in the entire southern half of my state there are three homeless shelters which combined can hold roughly 125 people.  also in the southern half of my state are two of the porrest counties in the NATION and the violent crime capital of the US.  how is it that in one of the most economicaly depressed, crime and gang riddled areas of our coutry that there are so few services for those in need.  mind you i understand that homeless selters are not the only form of service provided to those in need.  however, there isn't really much else going on.  the council of pastors for my community has shot down a number of ideas to help the hispanic population we have as well as ideas to help with the gang problem.  how sad is that.  the CHURCH is refusing to do anything.  what the fuck?  so i decided that if no one is going to do somthing about this i will.  so i am embarking on a fact finding mission to determine what the needs in my county are and how they are being addressed.  then from there to see how the current services could be improved, how more services could be offered, or if those are both already taken care of to start an education program to educate the community about the services that are offered and how they can access them.  i am very excited about this.  it will give me somthing purposeful to do on my days off.  somthing better than sitting around drinking or wasting my time watching tv.

so thats that.  i am frustrated with many more things but i don't have the inclination to write about all of them here.  read the news and you will find many of my frustrations.  walk into a homeless shelter and you will find the rest of them.