A Prayer for an Election Year

O God, grant the next President the ability to make just decisions!
     Grant the Vice President the ability to make fair decisions!
That he will govern Your people fairly,
     and Your oppressed ones equitably.
May the mountains bring news of peace to the people,
     and the prairies announce justice.
May he defend the oppressed among the people;
     and deliver the children of the poor and crush the oppressor.
Then people will fear You as long as the sun and moon remain in the sky,
     for generation after generation.
O, that his words will descend like rain on the mown grass,
     like showers that drench the earth.
May the Godly flourish during his days;
     and may peace prevail as long as the moon remains in the sky.
May he be respected from sea to shining sea,
     and from the Rio Grande to the Great Lakes!
Before him may the violent lands calm down,
     and may his enemies be ashamed of their actions.
May the rulers of Iran and the Middle East offer gifts;
     the leaders of China and North Korea bring their respects.
Grant him respect from all other world leaders;
     may the entire world align in interests and goals.
For he will be rescuing the needy when they cry out for help,
     and the oppressed who have no defender.
He will be taking pity on the poor and needy;
     the lives of the needy he will save through his policies.
From harm and violence he will be defending them;
     he will value their lives as he values his own.
May he flourish!  May they offer him gifts from Europe!
     May they continually pray for him!
     May they pronounce blessings on him all day long!
May there be no famine in all the earth, nor drought;
     may prosperity come to all the peoples of the earth!
May America's people flourish to bless the whole earth!
     May its crops be as abundant as the grass of the earth!
May he meet with the approval of all citizens;
     and may his legacy last as long as the sun remains in the sky!
People will use his name when they think of blessings,
     and all the world will consider him to be favored by God!

The Lord God, the God of the Bible, deserves praise!
     He alone accomplishes all great things!
His glorious name deserves praise forevermore!
     May his majestic splendor fill the whole earth!
We agree....we agree!

....adapted from Psalm 72

Stories....

First published on Stories of LINC North Texas

What stories do you come in contact with on a daily basis?  Perhaps you sit down in the evening and hear a recap of your spouse's day, or you overhear co-workers talking about their social or family life.  While you eat breakfast, perhaps you listen to stories of famine, war, and recession on the news.  Each of these stories, however, exists in a vacuum - your co-worker's weekend recap has about as much to do with your daily life as the uprisings in Syria.

What if we started to think about how our stories could be interconnected?  Imagine God for a minute as a wise author, penning the tales of not just world events and dramatic mission trips, but your daily experiences.  Could it be that God is in the business of telling one grand story from Genesis to Revelation, and that even our daily experiences figure into this story somehow?  Let me give you one example of one young girl's story becoming part of the story of an entire school district.

A young girl in our program in Ft. Worth sat in her AVID class one Friday while LINC NT's SALI teachers showed a video entitled, "If you really knew me..."  She was impressed by the concept and thought back to her story of surviving bullying.  She went home and created her own video that proclaimed how if you really knew her, you would know that she had survived bullying, depression, and worse, and that she was ready and willing to help others going through the same thing.  Tears in their eyes were the common experiences as the young girl showed the video to her class, and as the SALI teacher showed the video to the school faculty, then as the school administrators told the district leadership about the video.  The video is now set to become part of Ft. Worth ISD's bullying-prevention program.

One young girl had the bravery to share her story with others, and it now has the power to affect the stories of thousands of students across the city.  Her story was told because God weaved together the stories of LINC NT's staff, board members, and donors to create a program called SALI and bring it to a middle school in Ft. Worth.  This young girl asked, "Do you really know me?"  Now her classmates do.  If you hold your story inside and don't share it, whose stories will not be impacted and released?  And at the end of the day, do you really know those around you?  Think today about the stories that God is writing in you and in others.

The Trinity River Project

The Bridge

The opening of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas has been a major event this month.  The bridge is a work of art, designed by famous architect Santiago Calatrava, and spans from downtown Dallas into West Dallas, an extremely low-income and under-served neighborhood.  West Dallas was historically a neglected andabused region of Dallas, where minorities were relegated to frequent flooding and no public utilities.  Dallas has frequently been accused of having a highway system that cordons off low-income neighborhoods and bypasses unsightly areas of town, but this new bridge marks a change.  I drove down to the area on Tuesday morning to check it out.

The new bridge and the old one

The west side of downtown is a more industrial district, marked with courthouses, jails, and bail bond shops.  However, with the bridge not yet open to the public, I couldn’t find a safe place to park where numerous police cars wouldn’t take undue notice of me.  I crossed the Commerce street bridge over to West Dallas and located a “scenic overlook” spot that might have been scenic only in an alternate reality.  It looks out over the Trinity River, which is really more of an unsightly flood plain designed when levees were finally built to keep West Dallas from flooding.  This side of the river had significantly less traffic and visibility, so I parked my car and decided to walk down an embankment into the flood plain.  There was nothing but mud to discourage me, so I took about a half-mile walk through the plain to the bridge and got a chance to observe it up close.  Returning to my car, I took the long way back, taking a brief tour of an area of Dallas I have almost never been to.  It was striking to see how, right next to the business hub of Dallas, trailer parks and derelict houses that looked like they could have been photo-shopped in from a post-Katrina picture of New Orleans were the norm and small businesses provided scant groceries for the neighborhoods.  Crossing the Trinity River again at a different point, I saw a soccer field that looked like it was a broken ankle waiting to happen.  It is a far cry from the massive Trinity River renovation project that Dallas had been planning since 1959.

The Trinity River under the bridge

The proximity of striking poverty to downtown Dallas is an amazing sight to see.  All over Dallas, the distance between fabulous wealth and dire poverty is small, but this one is significant because the line is a river, a long-standing symbol of division in Dallas.  It is very encouraging to see the city making a major investment in the vicinity of West Dallas – for a long time all the investment has been north.  But as I was walking around the bridge, I realized that the bridge itself is not going to change West Dallas.  The bridge itself is actually a pretty minor roadway – it’s not a route that a lot of traffic will be taking.  If anything, the majority of the traffic will be West Dallas residents leaving the area to head north and east.  While this is significant in its own way, the reality is that development that spreads into West Dallas because of the bridge would likely be more gentrification, where low-income people are displaced by an influx of wealthier people.  This has long been a problem in urban areas.  What I realized while walking around the bridge was that the greatest opportunity for development in the area was the ground I was walking on.

The Continental Street bridge

The space between the levees is ugly and useless land. The river itself is small most of the time: the divider is actually the floodplain. While Dallas has long been talking about revitalizing the floodplain and developing something like a modern Riverwalk, funding for this has been consistently hard to come by and possibly even misappropriated. Perhaps the most encouraging thing about this bridge is that it is the first major success of the Trinity River restoration. If the Trinity River corridor could be renovated in the way that the master plan describes, it would be a world-class attraction that would put Dallas on the map and, the supporters argue, strongly build the city’s case for things like the Olympics and Super Bowls. It would also, I realized today, turn the dividing line between downtown and West Dallas into an attractive area that would be useful by people from both sides of the river, providing an opportunity for cultures to mingle and benefit from each other. The soccer fields and recreational facilities would be quickly accessible by low-income high-community people living in West Dallas, while entertainment and retail establishments would be desirable to high-income people living in Downtown and Uptown. Most city renovation projects “reclaim” land “spoiled” by low-income slums, but this one could develop currently wasted land into something beneficial to all. This bridge is a centerpiece of the end product. If the city of Dallas continues to put a priority on this project, the final corridor – to stretch from south Dallas almost all the way up to LBJ Freeway – would herald a new day for Dallas and its residents.

Future beautiful view?

I really enjoyed the opportunity to check out this part of Dallas that I rarely experience.  It reminded me that the work of development  in urban areas requires work from multiple angles.  The low-budget community development organizations working to rehabilitate individual families are essential for the task, but the government investing millions into large-scale renovations are also essential.  This experience encourages me to be a voice for the Trinity River project when I have the opportunity, because this project, if Dallas residents get behind it, could make a big difference in the city.  Key to this goal, however, is collaboration on both sides of the river.  Both communities have to be willing to participate and come to enjoy the end product.  Both communities also have to be open to experiencing the other side’s culture as exposed by the end product.  As I wiped the mud off my shoes near the Commerce street bridge, I knew that I wouldn’t be entirely wiping away the memory of walking through a space that someday may be a beautiful place where different communities come to meet.

Strike the Shepherd...

We've all heard the saying, "Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will scatter."  It's from Scripture in Zechariah 13:7 and fulfilled in Jesus in Matthew 26:31, but many people around the world believe it today.  It's the philosophy that led to targeting Osama bin Laden as a means of taking down Al Qaida, and even terrorism as a whole.  I recently read an eye-opening book called The Starfish and the Spider that made me think about this philosophy in a whole new way.  The authors describe decentralized organizations, where the top leader has decentralized his organization to such a point where the leader is relatively unimportant in the whole organization's being.  A key point in the book is that when a centralized organization attacks a decentralized one, the decentralized one becomes even more decentralized, making it bigger and more dangerous.  A prime example of this would be the US takedown of Napster, which led to even deeper decentralization of illegal file-sharing.

I just watched Invisible Children's newest short film, Kony 2012.  While there are many articles in defense and in opposition to this film, I have a different question.  Why does the LRA continue to exist?  The movie makes the argument that Joseph Kony is fighting solely to keep his own power.  However, I suggest that today, it's next-to-impossible for such a large group to form, stay together, and grow solely on a single leader's need for power.  There has to be a reason for the members of the group to stay together.  The movie makes the LRA out to be a highly centralized organization, and I wonder if it is centralized as they claim.  The fact that the entire force seems to have moved out of Uganda in response to many different organizations' efforts makes me wonder if they are more mobile and flexible than thought.  I do believe that Invisible Children and other multilateral forces may be able to capture Kony and bring him to justice.  I wonder, however, what will happen when he is taken out.  The sheep will definitely scatter, but the question is....is that a good thing?

God's Kingdom?

"Jesus, remember me when you come in your Kingdom!"  These were a few of the words that the Gospel-writer, Luke, records from one of the thieves next to Jesus on a cross like His.  Jesus responds remarkably favorably to him, especially considering that these were probably no ordinary thieves.  Robbery usually wasn't cause for crucifixion - they may have been revolutionaries, guilty of at least murder.  Jesus' promise of being with Him in paradise must have been even more surprising to those around the scene, since Matthew and Mark report that both thieves were hurling insults at Jesus.  Something that Jesus did or said must have made a big impression on this particular thief, because despite probably having only second-hand knowledge of this unusual man next to him, he makes an amazing request.

This was a time when even Jesus' disciples, who had been with him on this journey for three years, didn't quite understand what Jesus meant when He kept talking about His Kingdom.  They kept thinking that Jesus was going to bring about an earthly Kingdom, overthrowing the Roman empire and setting up a Jewish state again.  Even when Jesus rose from the dead, His disciples persisted in asking Him about an earthly Kingdom.  Yet this thief next to Jesus looked at a man clearly dying and spoke with expectancy about his kingdom!  Nobody looks at a dying man and starts dreaming about his future reign (this is part of why His disciples were so upset by the crucifixion!).  This thief suddenly understood that Jesus' Kingdom was not of this earth - something that so many others who knew Him better had missed.  This may be why Jesus is so quick to commend him.

Are there situations today where we are acting more like Jesus' disciples than this thief?  We're still waiting for that Christendom to be set up here on earth, hoping that our next Presidential election will finally bring Christian values flooding back into our nation.  We're railing about homosexual marriage laws, abortion laws, prayer in schools, taking down the Ten Commandments statues, and so on, longing for a return to a day when Christianity will be the Law of the Land.  Are we looking for an earthly Kingdom instead of Jesus' Kingdom?  Is there a subtle difference between "Thy Kingdom come" and setting up Jesus as an earthly King?  Certainly doesn't mean that we don't get involved in politics and governmental affairs - quite the opposite.  But our ultimate hope is in Heaven, not in Earth.