The Mountain We Must Climb

I believe that there is something of a significant paradigm shift taking place in this country regarding homelessness, and, for the most part, that young people are pushing that agenda.

However, passions and desires to do the right thing are often overwhelmed by the reality of just how difficult a task we face. 

The “mountain” just seems un-climbable.

In 1849, surveyors made a great discovery of Chomolungma, also known as Mount Everest - the tallest mountain in the world, at 29,029 feet.

Everest was also considered un-climbable. Anything over 24,000 feet was referred to as the “Death Zone”. Sadly, hundreds have died in the attempt to reach the top of Everest.

The first man to officially make it to the top of Everest was Sir Edmund Hillary.

Turns out, the mountain was climbable after all… it just took 100 years to do it.

Caring for the homelessness, social justice, justice ministry… call it whatever you want, but we can climb this mountain if we work together.

Homelessness is not just a mountain that we can observe from a distance. It’s not just a mountain that we attempt to climb, make it halfway up, and then turn around and go home. It’s a mountain that we can and need to intentionally climb and refuse to allow ourselves to not make it to the top.

At The Mustard Seed, with the help of literally thousands of volunteers and supporters, we will keep on climbing until we make it to the top. 

- Bill Nixon,  Director of Public Education, The Mustard Seed

@billbytheminute

Ego, Empathy & Ending Poverty

Have you ever seen a little kid running and suddenly do a face plant into the ground? Or watched a clip from America’s Funniest Home Videos where a backyard stunt goes horribly wrong?  What happens when you see this?  If you’re like me, you immediately cringe and partly shut your eyes, your legs might go numb, or you grab the body part that the victim just potentially injured.

In a strange way you feel their pain…it’s like for a moment you’re in their shoes.

Why is that?

Scientists attribute it to “mirror neurons” in the frontal region of the brain; they seem to mediate empathy and allow us to sense the pain of others as if it were our own – just by seeing it.  I guess this helps explain why I cry every time I watch “The Notebook.”  Although it seems we are soft-wired for empathy, it does not automatically mean we are compassionate to others.  This altruistic tendency must be cultivated in order to reach its full potential.

“Do to others what you would have them do to you…”

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus seemed to see the direct connection between experiencing the love of God, self-love, and loving others; he experienced the connectedness between all of us and everything around us.  He also noticed how our ego, what Paul calls our “old self”, tends towards violence and apathy.  Judgement, greed, intolerance, prejudice and hatred all flow out of a me-first mentality.  So does apathy, which in most cases is more violent than hatred.  Jesus sought to cultivate the heart to allow the empathic nature to grow and strengthen…preparing the soil to allow the seeds of compassion to sprout and take root.

It’s funny, children are so good at this.  As soon as one baby cries the other will start crying, as if they can feel each other’s hunger.  A kid on the playground willingly shares her goodies with her friends; in a pure and simple way she understands that her friend’s happiness affects her own. Like Jesus said, we need to be like little children, having open minds and hearts to our shared humanity.

What is my point exactly?  We have come to a place in our history when it is no longer advantageous to see the destruction of our “enemy” or stockpile our wealth and ignore the needs of our neighbor.  We are now so interdependent on the well-being of the “other” that war, discrimination and apathy are out-dated.  Like the Dali Lama said, “We must strive for reconciliation and always remember the interests of others.  We cannot destroy our neighbors or ignore their interests!  This would ultimately lead to our own suffering.”

Homelessness and poverty in general affects all of us; the systemic, economic, social service, government, and societal costs negatively impact everyone.  The question becomes to what point are we awakened to this fact and how do we respond?  The evidence is there…we are all connected and the well-being of your neighbor directly impacts your own.  Our fences, gates and closed doors cannot keep it’s effect out, but only perpetuates the problem.

Do you allow yourself to feel the pain of others?  How you respond to the needs of your neighbor and the community you live in?

How are you cultivating a compassionate heart and love for others?  Do you see the hurting person as your own brother or sister; a part of the whole human family?  Do you see how much your neighbor needs you and you need them?

The Mustard Seed cannot end homeless alone; the roots of poverty spread deeper and wider than its reach.  You have eyes, ears, hands, feet and a heart, so look around you; listen to the cries for compassion and belonging; reach out and embrace; walk a mile in their shoes; feel the heartbeat of a humanity that you are an integral part of.

- Josh

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Woe to Those Who Hate the Rich

“But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort” Luke 6:24

It may be accurate to say that I don’t feel any fluffy butterflies in my belly when I see someone driving their Corvette top-down, wearing off fancy sunglasses, and playing gangsta music pounding hard enough to inflict internal bleeding. And neither do I feel the fury Chuck Norris directs towards them. Honestly, I really just don’t fit in with the rich.

Let's start here with a bit of background. I grew up in an immigrant family. My mother, originally from the Philippines, came over from Singapore to be a nanny in Canada; and my Dad came over from Yugoslavia, the part now called Croatia. After my parents got hitched, they bought an acreage - perhaps in the hopes of reclaiming the family farm my father once had in his homeland. Now I wouldn’t call us poor; we were only on welfare for a couple months. However, I do remember that people thought we were poor. Sure we didn’t have any running water most of the time. I remember feeling only a little embarrassed when we arrived at church with empty jugs, which my Dad and I filled between Sunday School and the morning Service. And sure we didn’t have the nicest place. I still remember those bus rides where the veterans in the backseat took it upon themselves to give the new kids the exclusive tour of the route. On this tour, my house was referred to as the “dirty place”. The obligatory oohs and ahhs that followed made me feel special, but also sad for my mom: she can be a real clean-freak; she just loves to keep things clean. Despite all these things, we still lived pretty comfortably.

These experiences, however, served to create a gap between me and the rich; I just don’t understand them. Hopefully now you, my dear reader, can understand my skepticism when a fairly large design and architecture firm, decided to donate their time and money to the housing program at The Mustard Seed Edmonton by landscaping the grounds surrounding our first apartment building. As I helped to plant trees and spread a variety of different rocks and mulch on the ground, I couldn’t help wonder why they were there. The Jekyll in me said, “It is from the bottom of their good hearts”; while the Hyde in me said, “It is from the guilt; they have to do something good to make them feel better.”

Christ in me, who become poor for us, says, “Love your neighbour”. I am still learning to do this because I not have both poor and rich neighbours. Woe to me if I love one and not the other, if I do good to my friends and spite my enemy, if I am not thankful for the generosity of those who have much. And also because I don’t like woe all that much.

Love Lots,


Jeremiah

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The Common Denominator

Last week I celebrated my one-year anniversary working at The Mustard Seed. I really thought that by this point, I would be a legitimate expert on how to address the issues of poverty and homelessness. Feel free to break here for a good minute of laughter, then meet me back in reality. I promise you’ll be glad you came along for the ride.

When I started here, I joined a fresh-faced team in the newly-established Employment Centre. The learning curve was steep, but so exciting. I embraced the Housing-First model and revelled in the idea that helping people find and sustain meaningful employment was the secret to success that no one else had uncovered. I started to break down all of the old stereotypes I had previously (and secretly) held, replacing them with new theories on the common denominators of homelessness. Though we faced challenges, as a team we pressed on towards building a supported employment program that would work for everyone: a silver bullet straight through the heart of poverty, giving people a real “hand up” and eliminating the need for “hand outs”.

It’s easy to get excited about programs like this one, because on a broad scale, the statistics show that they are working. Over 300 people housed since the launch of our housing program, Aftercare, and over 100 people employed; sustainable life change is happening right there in the numbers.

When I see the success in these figures, my initial reaction is to jump to the next big idea: people who are homeless don’t need food or temporary shelter, they just need to be supported in the “bigger” challenges of life, and the rest will fall into place.

Let’s fast forward to two days before my one-year anniversary. I was in the Denver airport dreaming up this blog post and how I would report on every piece of quantitative data I could find about what had been achieved in the last 365 days. I guess I did a little too much daydreaming, because I didn’t catch the gate change or boarding announcements, and there I was, missing my first flight ever. Thankfully, though, I wasn’t alone.

Ida is a lovely woman of about the same age as my mother who missed her connection from California on her way to see her son and his young family in Red Deer. As we hurried together between customer service counters and departure gates, we bonded over frustrations with United Airlines, but soon learned that we had more in common than we thought.

When we finally sat down for a drink in the lounge, Ida asked what I did for work. I told her about The Mustard Seed and her face began to glow. “I used to get meals from a place like that back home 20 years ago,” she told me. “That’s good work you’re doing. Important work.”

She went on to tell me about her struggles with addictions, living in her car, her family’s “tough love” approach. It wasn’t a sob story, but a story of hope. She explained how this unnamed organization in Southern California saved her life starting with a meal. Taken aback, I clarified: “So really? That’s what you needed? Just some food?” “ And some people who cared. They got me by until I was ready to change.”

I’m sure my face was glowing by this point, too, as I began to reconsider everything I thought I’d learned in the past year. I started to think of the innovative food programs I had been hearing about and how we could implement them here, bringing the focus back to the basics. Maybe we need to make sure everyone in the city is fed before we can get them housed and employed. The wheels were turning quickly: affordable organic markets, pay-what-you-can restaurants. I could see the success rates soaring. And then the wheels stopped.

I looked at Ida, her kind eyes and the deep, intricate pattern of lines surrounding them, her flowing silver hair falling on her tanned, leather shoulders. She is a portrait of a human being, uniquely different from every single person standing in the meal line, every Aftercare participant, every newly-employed client. Her experiences cannot be captured with quantitative statistics, but they are an inspiring story of success that encourages me to keep doing the “important work” much more than figures and innovative programming ever will.

As I embark on my second year at The Mustard Seed, I still believe in Housing-First and the supported employment model. I still have hope that we can find new ways to meet basic needs in a healthy and empowering way. The difference this year will be that I will be giving the statistics faces and remembering that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to helping a person rebuild their lives. I'm far from being an expert, but I will leave room for one common denominator: that person will always know that someone cares. 

- Lydia
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Poetry

A few weeks ago Alan, a resident in our new apartment building, shared this poem with me that he had written and told me that I could share this poem because he wanted to help raise awareness around the issues of poverty.  This poem reinforces to be the fact that people don't grow up dreaming about being homeless- they dream the same dreams that we do; travelling the world, falling in love, starting a business, going to school or having a family.

Sleepy Angel

By Alan

I watched her quietly sleep with a slight smile on her face.

Maybe she was dreaming about when her mother threw her a birthday party when she was just six.

Or when she dreamed about being married to a Prince when she was a little girl.

Away she laid quietly sleeping on a cold winter night on a sidewalk downtown Edmonton.

What is Justice?

What is Justice?
Have you ever considered the word “justice”?

Here’s how the dictionary defines it:
jus•tice noun 1.: The quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness: to uphold the justice of a cause. 2. The administering of deserved punishment or reward. (Dictionary.com)

The Bible talks about justice in a lot of different ways:

Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause. Isaiah 1:17

But let justice roll down like waters And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Amos 5:24

But what does all this talk about justice really mean for us? Administer punishment to the person we see littering? Go pleading for the widows to our government officials? Can we turn on a tap and see justice flow out like water? How does justice actually work? What does it look like?

Theologian Walter Brueggemann writes, “covenant members who practice justice and righteousness are to be active advocates for the poor and marginalized; that’s how we love God, by actively loving our neighbor.” Civil rights activist Cornel West says, “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”

God’s justice is all about equality. The invitation of the Gospel is to live in such a way that aims to correct the inequalities in our community; sharing resources, knowledge, and opportunity. I like how the prophet Amos says, “Let justice roll down like waters.” The neat thing about water is that it spreads out equally wherever it is; it fills all areas in the same way. This is how I imagine justice to look- like water in a pond, there may be an uneven bottom, but the top is level; equal, all the areas of the pond are filled with water. Water doesn’t judge the bottom of the pond, which nook or cranny is worthy of being filled, it just fills everything up equally.

Perhaps that is how justice should work today. Loving our neighbor like water filling a pond; not judging the worthiness of the neighbor, just filling each one up with love and justice equally.

The following is a link to a video about Justice. It asks us: “If justice and injustice were embodied by humans, what would they have to say to us? Whose voice would sound more familiar?”

Have a look HERE to find out.