Hello everyone! Here is my first real LAUP update. I apologize for the delay in getting this up, but since my schedule's finally settling down, this will be happening much more regularly.
So then, how was the Los Angeles Urban Project? Well, fictitious reader, LAUP was intense, and the first day set the tone for the remainder of the program. What happened the first day was that everyone met at the church on Workman St (our normal meeting place), and drove out to LA's financial district. It was pretty familiar to me-- not that I've ever been there before, but if you've seen one financial district, you've seen them all, right? The only thing was that once we got there, we walked down to Skid Row, then circled around and walked back. The entire trip took maybe 45 minutes, there and back.
Now, here are some pictures to help you imagine the change in scenery. Here's the financial district:
Pretty typical, right? It looks like a nice place to be. Clean sidewalks, shiny new cars, and skyscrapers. Everyone you see is in sharp business attire and walking with purpose, and there's a faint aura of money in the air. Basically what you would expect from any metropolitan economic hub.
Now here's Skid Row:
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The streets here are devoid of cars, but full of people. People sit on the sidewalks with nowhere to go, with all their belongings in shopping carts or set next to them on the ground. People line up half a block for get food from the missions or soup kitchens. The sidewalk is cracked, there's old, blackened gum stuck everywhere, and there's a faint but persistent smell of garbage and urine. It's a whole different world just a couple blocks down, and walking back up to the financial district is just as mentally jarring as walking down to Skid Row. You can literally see the socio-economic level rise and fall before your eyes.
Here's a helpful parallel to give you some idea of just how close these two are. Imagine getting off a flight, going through the airport terminal, passing the baggage claim, and walking out to the sidewalk. It takes the same amount of time to get from the financial district to Skid Row.
Over the next few days, we continued to become better acquainted with LA. We got to visit some historically and culturally signifiant places (such as Olvera Street, Chinatown, and Hollywood), read articles on inner city issues, and each night we all gathered at the Workman St. Church to listen to speakers who live and serve in the city. During each of those nightly meetings each team would come up with one major issue affecting the inner city, attach it to the second-floor guardrail, and tie string to two more related issues other teams observed. For example, if my team saw that gangs were a problem, we could tie it to incarceration and then to unemployment. After only a week of being in LA, we had built a web of 40 different, interrelated issues hanging above us during every meeting. It was unbelievably oppressive, and it made me feel so angry and hopeless. Even if we were to cut one issue off the walls, its links to other ones would stop it from falling-- an apt metaphor for attempting to fix any one problem at a time.
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| Not a great picture, but imagine worshipping underneath all that. "Sexual abuse", "broken families", "drug addiction". |
During worship on the last night of orientation week, we got to cut down the whole web. It wasn't a ceremony so much as a declaration-- that the only way that these problems can ever be adequately addressed is through the power of Jesus. He himself declared that "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." -Luke 4:18-19.
Brothers and sisters, there is no governmental program on Earth that could take down this web. No non-profit has the power to tackle this, and we by ourselves are outrageously and hilariously inadequate for a job of such staggering magnitude. The only possible answer is God himself, and if we have any hope of bringing about his good news or freedom, we have to be utterly surrendered to him and his will.
Brothers and sisters, there is no governmental program on Earth that could take down this web. No non-profit has the power to tackle this, and we by ourselves are outrageously and hilariously inadequate for a job of such staggering magnitude. The only possible answer is God himself, and if we have any hope of bringing about his good news or freedom, we have to be utterly surrendered to him and his will.
There's so much more to talk about and so much more I learned, but that will have to come later. Until then, brothers and sisters.
SDG,
-Gordon
