From New Orleans, Bittersweetly

Part of our team with John, our tour guide through Arabi and St. Bernard's Parish

Our whole team plus some of our fellow Habitat volunteers from the "other" Washington

To those of you following this blog during United Life's trip to New Orleans last week, thank you for your support and prayer. We arrived safely back at SeaTac on Saturday night, where we were picked up by three kind United Lifers willing to give up their late weekend evening to help us finish finding our way home.

Our return to Seattle, I have to admit, was bittersweet, though perhaps for unexpected reasons. The trip went pretty well: Habitat for Humanity, the organization that we partnered with, did a great job of both providing meaningful work for us all week long, as well as giving us the opportunity to get to know the neighborhoods of the homes we were helping to build. Yet despite our successes, I returned feeling somewhat a failure.

I've always judged myself. I suppose I've believed that being able to criticize myself before anyone else had a chance to helped me to stay on people's good sides. But I wonder whether this was ever really the case. Yes, judging yourself can at times keep you from offending others. But no one can spend their whole life trying not to do something. We're built for things, not to avoid things, and anytime I try to make everyone happy it seems that no one ends up happy, including myself.

During our team's time in New Orleans, I started to have this sense that my leadership was not adequate. I didn't feel like I did a good job leading, which is a depressing thought when that's what you've been hired to do. I wondered if I said enough. I wondered if I said too much. By the time I returned to Seattle this feeling started spreading into other areas of my life as well. If I couldn't lead a trip, I questioned just how well I was doing leading a church. I wondered if my sermons were having any real impact. I wondered if our drive for more of our people to serve and for our ministry to become more missional was just more spinning of wheels in mud. I wondered I was ever going to see anybody's life really change. I had the feeling this Sunday that our congregation was falling away, member by member, at first in spirit, but then, inevitably, physically as well. Nobody was following, and I had myself to blame.

Since then I've had a couple of good conversations, one with the United Life board who prayed for me during our monthly prayer meeting, the second with a mission team member who shared what happened for him spiritually during the trip. Both of those helped me to see that my perception of reality was off: that things were happening, even if I felt otherwise. God was moving. Period.

With that said, this isn't to say that I don't need to be sharpened, that there isn't something to learn from whatever mistakes I may have made. But mistakes should never lead a follower of Christ to despair, because that's not where he's leading us. If anything, his love for us is so strong that no failure of ours can ever break it, and that means that there is always a real hope for tomorrow.

So where do I go from here? I know I can't just will myself to hope. For this, I'll draw a lesson from the hammer. On our last day in New Orleans, our team put in a half-day of work on a house that was in need of a roof. While another team worked on installing the roof, part of our United Life team worked on the ceiling, effectively squeezing us between the two. This sometimes meant we only had an inch or two to lift the hammer off of the nail and bring it back down. Anyone's who's hammered a real three inch nail into a real piece of solid lumber knows how long that sort of hammering takes. But even though many of my strikes felt as if they weren't moving the nail even a millimeter, the truth was it was moving. Even if I couldn't see it, I was driving the nail slowly deeper.

How often in life does it feel like nothing is moving, not even a millimeter? I think that's what started to drag me down as I questioned my leadership and the progress of United Life under my pastorate. But I had to keep swinging the hammer, even if I could only lift it an inch. That meant little things like hanging out with people when I just felt like going home. That meant showing up when I felt like disappearing. That meant letting myself into situations where I wasn't going to present myself as "the perfect pastor", and having enough faith that God would still be able to do something.

Sometimes the finish line is pretty far away and we're tempted to stop taking any steps forward. This is understandable, but foolishness. Let's keep each other from falling into that.

New orleans, day 3

This morning we didn't start work right away due to a thunder storm. This gave us the chance to see some of the parts of new orleans that I didn't think we'd have time to see this week, specifically downtown new orleans as well as a person, our former construction site supervisor, Christina.

Both visiting Christina and downtown reminded me of how much more this trip is about people than buildings. Downtown we visited a famous hat store, and the wife of the owner, a lovely little lady with a french accent, charmed all of us (and sold a couple of hats). This trip was about God's love for her. And for the families and communities we are serving. And about the people we are working, eating, and dorming with. This trip is about God's heart for his people.

Please pray that our hearts burn with the same love that is in God's heart.

New orleans, day 4

Yesterday it felt like, just as we were getting used to our job, we had to learn a new one. Today we were able to take what we had learned yesterday (specifically: framing the walls of the house) and begin to get used to it once again.
I was struck again by what a delicate balance of technical skill, coaching, vision casting, resource management, and ability to find jobs for people goes on at a short term mission site. Habitat does a great job of that, though we were blessed to have a professional contractor in our group.
I was also struck by how useful experience is. Though I've never been formally trained, I've been on a few work sites, and it helped me to dive in and find work for myself. One mission trip isn't enough: you've got to go on a few in order to get comfortable with the wide variety of jobs you have, and to begin to see past the jobs to the people behind them. 
So my word to everyone who's only been on one mission trip: start praying about your next one!

New orleans, day 2

We attended a habitat for humanity house dedication today. Habitat, the organization that we're working for, has built over 300 homes and sold them for no profit to low income families (monthly payments come out to about 550 to 650 bucks). Their goal, high quality affordable housing for everyone, sounds impossible, but their pursuit of it has led to thousands of changed lives.

Thank you for your prayers: we were able to make some serious progress on our own housing project today, despite taking a break in the middle to go to the hosuing dedication. Thank God for a great work group and habitat/americorps staff.

We cherish your prayers!

coming back from New Orleans...

First of all, let me say a huge thank you to everyone who supported our team in prayer this past week. We had a great trip, and it would not have been possible without the support of the entire UPCS family. Thank you!

And now for an update:

We landed in SeaTac on Saturday night at 11:30 PM, a little ahead of schedule, after spending a week living and working not far from the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. As many people have heard, the Lower 9th was the hardest hit of all the neighborhoods in New Orleans, with Hurricane Katrina not only flooding homes, but even smashing and knocking them off of their foundations. Now, three and a half years later, the neighborhood is still basically uninhabited, with its residents still unable to return and rebuild.

Our team had four different job sites during the week, all of them located in the Lower 9th or its surrounding neighborhoods. We worked on flooring, roofing, painting, and even warehouse reorganizing. We put up doors, installed trim, and loaded trash into dump trailers (or tried to). All in all, we did our best to help move a few homes along towards being reinhabited by their rightful owners.

Now, I've got a confession to make. I've been on several short term mission trips (including three trips to New Orleans), and every time I came back I thought I should post but didn't. I had so many thoughts and emotions that I wanted to share, the idea of trying to fit them all into a post was overwhelming. Instead I relied on debriefing nights with our mission teams, putting together presentations for the whole church, and talking about the trips over meals with interested people to get it all out there. But now, I've got this blog dedicated to ministry (which I wanted to update while we were there but couldn't), and it's time I gave this a shot.

So...where to begin?

Obviously, there's no way to put what the whole trip meant on here. I think that's part of what makes going to New Orleans such an important and worthwhile endeavour. Every year different people get different things out of the trip (and give different things to it), and the only common denominator is that people keep coming back (we shared our lodgings with a group of retired church goers from out east who had been back three times in the past 12 months).

So...where to begin?

I think what I need to share today is how I see this trip to New Orleans fitting in with the larger vision of our ministry, UnitedLife, and our church's (UPCS) entire body. You know, there were many elements of this trip that just made it into a great experience: the work, the people we encountered, the things we witnessed, the friendships that were deepened. But my prayer is that this trip would be more than a good or even life-changing experience. My prayer is that it would be our signature experience.

Tubby Smith, the highly regarded coach who turned around a pitifully non-competitive University of Minnesota's men's basketball team in just two years, talked in his first year as the team's coach about getting what's called a "signature win". Such a game was one in which his team won by performing to its full potential, a performance that people would recall when judging how well the team played that season. Although they didn't get that signature win their first year, Smith's phrase stuck with me.

It takes a lot of resources to make a short term mission trip happen. Not only did it take a great fundraiser and the help of a lot of volunteers, this trip to New Orleans required thirteen people all willing to lay their own agendas aside for a week for the sake of a few families that needed homes. It meant sleeping on prison mattresses, having to wear earplugs to bed, and soggy PB and J sandwiches for a week. It took sacrifice, not just for its own sake, but for the sake of people who could use our help.

And this, I pray, will be our signature experience. Spending our resources (energy, time, and finances) to show people Christ's love is what I hope we think of when we think of UnitedLife. I pray that we as a ministry and church would yearn to see God's kingdom come and His will be done on earth, even if it means making some difficult choices and sacrifices. And I hope that we become a people that don't need a mission trip to be a part of God's mission.