Fall Frenzy

Every year, my church family puts on a harvest party for a low income school(s) where the kids can come with their parents and play games and get way more candy than they will ever need. This year, my awesome cluster was in charge of face painting and tattoos at one of the schools.

They did a great job - even when the requests were completely bizarre. "I want a mustache and," pointing to different parts of his face, "a kiss mark here and kiss mark here and a kiss mark here."

Between the group of us, we managed to decorate faces and hands on several hundred children, all within the space of an hour and a half, and not make any permanent messes in the classroom.

Watching adult, high school, and middle school small groups come together to pull off this kind of event is amazingly fun and a great reminder that - whether people have been here for twenty years or two weeks - our church family really is just that, a family.

Remembering

Game prior to Ryan sharing about his trip

This week, one of the high school leaders shared about his recent trip to Haiti. The last time that I saw this group of kids listen that attentively... we were IN Haiti - and the group was about a quarter of this size. I'm not sure that they were all breathing, that's how quiet it was in the room. The kids who haven't been to Haiti yet were listening carefully. (And, yes, that is a yet. Quite a few of them are already talking about going next year.) The kids who have been were listening - and remembering - with their whole bodies.

I could have walked into the room mid talk and, without hearing anything or seeing what was on the screen, told you what part of the trip was being discussed. That was how perfectly their body language while hearing/remembering mirrored their body language the first time that they lived it out.

Before we left Haiti, we talked about the way that their brain was probably going to be processing what they had seen and felt, how it probably was processing already. We talked about the fight or flight response that was full on in the process of throwing them for a loop, about why their insides were responding to, "Can you wait five minutes to do that?" as if it were a threat to life and limb. We also talked about how Haiti memories were going to feel different than their memories of last year's math class, about how the human brain stores trauma - things that register as "holy-crud-what-do-I-do with this!?" - as emotion and sensory input (sound, heat, color) rather than normal picture memories. We talked about nightmares and about trauma memories making things feel like they were happening again.

Then, we came back. And, for a few weeks, they lived all of that out hardcore. They were up at night and awake early in the morning. No matter what they were doing, you could read Haiti in their eyes. The entire country had slipped in there and taken up residence.

After a couple of weeks, it started to fade into the normalness of the rest of their lives - even if it was a distinctly new normal.

Two and a half months after getting back, those memories are still so raw and just under the surface that the flash backs come out, not only through their eyes or their faces like a normal ministry trip might, but through every muscle in their bodies. And, yet, these are the kids who stand around afterwards for as long as Ryan will let them, wanting to know more, tell more, remember more, because they miss it, and they want to go back. These are the kids who, before we had gotten all the way home, before they had caught up on sleep or recovered from colds, were already talking about "next year...go[ing] somewhere hard."

Pardon me while I pick my jaw up off of the floor.

Have I mentioned that these kids amaze me?

Work

Yep. These are my kids. Well, some of them. (And, yes, they are being lions. No big deal.)

I'm currently working with these guys in the morning a couple days a week and then heading to one of the elementary schools to make sure some older kids survive lunch and recess alive and without wearing much of their neighbor's food.

All in all, it makes life very entertaining, between the littles who are convinced that teachers have two goals in life 1) to be used as piece of furniture and 2) to play tag and the biggers who are convinced that teachers - or at least Ms. Jessica - have three goals in life 1) listen to their stories 2) listen to them burp and 3) play tag.

Can we see the overlap where Jessica might be spending a lot of time running in circles?

The Dark Side of Chocolate

Score one for my local church getting nvolved in human trafficking. What you see on your screen is part of the twenty-five or so people who were present for a screening of the Dark Side of Chocolate and a Q&A session afterwards.

Actually, score more than one, because this is far from the only movement in this direction. By spring we hope to be moving full force ahead. For now, check out my other blog for more details as to where we're headed and what's currently in the works. Because, I think that you might get just as excited about all of this as I am.

Best part? There are other people eager to leadership of most of the parts and pieces, meaning, no matter where God takes me over the next couple of years, there will still be people here, making this happen. Yep. It's a very cool thing.

PS. Watch the documentary online here
Get a kit to host your own screening here
Or, watch the mini-documentary that we used last year with the high school group here

7:11

Twice a year the middle school youth group puts on fun nights, where the goal is more or less to make sure that leaders are outnumbered by at least a dozen to one, station said leaders at various activities, and then release two hundred odd middle schoolers (plus one of my fifth graders) to run through the church building for four hours, with a little bit of caution tape to let them know where they shouldn't be going.

Definitely sounds like the sort of plan that I would have come up with!

Because of my lack of either a cloning machine or a time turner, I rarely get to hang out with these kids, so love it when they do things like this that occur on not-Sundays. I love getting to connect with them, even if just for a few minutes while they shoot nerf darts at each other, box in an inflatable bounce house, sumo wrestle, shoot potato guns, or slip over to show me their pockets full of candy. I love seeing plenty of faces that I know and quite a few that I don't know. I love the sixth graders who are trying hard to be too cool to need me around anymore but still check over their shoulder constantly to make sure that, whatever that cool thing was that they just did, I saw and approve of. I love the seventh graders who decide that the balance between grown up and childlike is absolutely, over the top hyper that runs its mouth a mile a minute. I love the eighth graders who see the world with that clarity that comes from having one foot in one and stage and one foot in the other. I love that, even though they don't have to, they're still willing to let older people help define their world. I love that they're becoming almost as fast as they are being, and I love that they know it. Middle school is just a fun age.

Although, one of the boys came up to say hi and leaned his elbow on my shoulder. Yeah. I definitely did not give permission for him to be this tall yet. Way to make me feel old, kid. I already felt old enough when your brother graduated from high school, thankyouverymuch. No need to rub it in.

Occupy Wall Street

"Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants."

Since September 17th, New York City has been "occupied" by a group of people who have decided that it is finally time to stand up, speak up, and live out change. And, I do mean live out, in the most literal sense of the words. There are no tents or hanging tarps, no "structures" of any kind, just a mass of sleeping bags and bodies each night. They provide each other with food, warm clothing, first aid, entertainment, and a chance to be heard.

There are grandmothers who want peace, pilots and teachers who want better pay, parents who want a better future for their children, and an entire generation of twenty-somethings who, collectively, see a thousand symptoms of a broken system and have decided, in a method that is 1/3 protest, 1/3 street fair, and 1/3 social media, to do something about it. They are leaderless, but not visionless, intentionally without a formal list of demands, but not without dreams of a new world.

Over the last weeks, largely without the attention of traditional media, they have spread to well over 800 US cities, and they don't have any intention of going away any time soon. It might just be time to sit up and listen.

• Information and media from the Wall Street occupation

• Well put together video on the movement
• Working draft of Solidarity Principles
• Another video and another
• News feed regarding the movement
• Photos more photos and more photos
• A beautifully calm essay on language and terminology
• Occupy Portland
• Occupy Tri-Cities

TVPRA Update

Today (Wednesday, October 5), the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs unanimously passed the TVPRA (Trafficking Victims Protection Re-authorization Act)! After not even being on the docket last week, the bill was fast-tracked on Monday. Thanks came from Chairman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to those "who took this unseen issue and made it a top priority."

The bill now moves on to the full House and could be voted on by the Senate committee as early as tomorrow.

Learn more about the TVPRA here.

Something Beautiful

You Dance

Short video on Human Trafficking that I pieced together for the women's group at my church.