If Social Justice is Cool Consider Me Miles Davis!!

A year ago I began a process that would alter almost every aspect of my life...I took a leap of faith and joined a program called Mission Year. I joined Mission Year in hopes that I would learn how to better Love and Serve my fellow man. I knew that this would not be achieved over night...I knew it would be a process
The following is the affect of that process.


My interest in being an advocate for the voiceless began long before my journey with Mission Year.
It started with a small summer camp in southwest Missouri, where a punk 15 year old kid came face to face with the thing he feared the most, the truth. The ugly truth that people in our country are not treated equally. In short I came to the realization that we are all surrounded by Injustice.

Injustice is almost everywhere, in our actions as a society, in the small cultural euphemisms we use, in the unsaid thoughts that we think when we see someone who is "different". This is not the way things should be, but ever since the fall of man injustice has been one of the daily struggles that we as humans must face. In this entry I won't go into how the word Righteousness in the bible is exchangeable with justice. When the scriptures call us to be a righteous people it is saying that we need to be a just and fair people and that we need to bring God's redemptive Justice to the dark corners of our society where Injustice reigns supreme.

As most people are aware there are countless programs here in America and abroad that focus strictly on what are now considered "Social Justice Issues". These programs work at both the local, state, national, and international level to ensure the injustices throughout our world are being intentionally opposed. Programs like The mentoring Project, To Write Love on Her Arms, Living Water, Invisible Children, and so many others should work as an inspiration to us to continue our fight against injustice.

Fighting Injustice is not an easy task, for many of us we have socially ingrained hatred, and fear that we can not just ignore but rather that we must face and defeat. Like the "great commission" the call to fight injustice starts in a local format and expands wider and wider until the entire globe is consumed in beautiful redemptive justice.

So to be concise, because the time for more in-depth conversation about living a just lifestyle has yet to come, we must look at our surroundings and find the injustices in our community, identify them, and face them however that must be done.

There is more to come on this thought but in the time in-between take a look around your neighborhood/city and ask yourself what injustices plague you and your fellow man day in and day out, and what can you do about it?

This may be the most important question in your life... In this moment how can I better serve both God and my fellow man?

More to be said...

Peace, Love, Happiness
Isaac T Rice



Sites mentioned
www.twloha.com
www.water.cc
www.thementoringproject.org
www.invisiblechildren.com

The HPD and Me

A quick note to update you on a pressing matter....

One unavoidable thing about in working in the inner-city is interaction with police. Sometimes your interactions are positive and sometimes they are negative. Unfortunately two of my friends and I were the subject of some of the negative kind of interaction lately. One day my teammate David and I were waiting for the bus home after work, as we always do, when one of our co-workers in the after-school program pulled up to offer us a ride. We stood on the corner for a few minutes talking to our friend while he was in his car. As we stood there talking to him a policeman drove by (which is not an odd site as they constantly peruse the streets of the third-ward) my friend enacted his hazard lights and the policeman passed without trouble. We got into the car with our friend and were on our way home when we were abruptly pulled over. Immediately the police were at the windows of the car requesting that we step out of the vehicle with our hands visible. Upon stepping out of the car I was instantly hand-cuffed, my friend (who was driving) was instantly hand-cuffed and put in the back of the cruiser (trying not to be accusatory but of the three of us he was the only one who was not white and I therefore believe he was racially profiled) David was also cuffed and the police began their search in what they believed to be a narcotics bust. After some rather forceful searching of both the car and ourselves, and a few off collar inquiries as to why two white guys were in that particular part of the neighborhood and why we got into the car with “him” (the police continually referred to our friend with an air of distaste) we were free to go along with our friend, who continued to give us a ride home, with a pitiful apology that showed me that they (the police) were more sorry that they didn’t find any drugs. As I said sometimes interaction with the police cannot be avoided and that is just part of inner-city ministry. Luckily we were not detained (much to the chagrin of the police I’m sure) mainly because we had done nothing illegal and I am still free to spread love to the wonderful people God has placed in my path.

This experience has shown me many things...not all positive...but one thing that struck me was something David said. David was very upset (as he well should be) after this ordeal and David made the comment that he has more respect and awe for Jesus. Because after his ( Jesus') ordeal he was able to love the guards who had beat him and hung him to die, and David now understood how that would be difficult after David experienced a little bit from the "criminal" standpoint.

The Real Guts and Gory!!

So my biggest mistake in life is, quite easily, the fact that I have convinced myself at different times that being a Christian is easy.

I am not talking about "Christian" in the sense that I grew up in America, or that I went to church, or that I prayed a prayer one night, and again another night because I wasn't sure that I had done it right the first time.

What I am talking about is a lifestyle, not a "religion".

I am talking about something that few have ever been able to grasp half the full concept of ( and I am nowhere even close to grasping one-one hundredth of it).

I am talking about looking at others no matter how much evil they have done to you, and being able to love them.( And not just say you love them but be willing to lay your life down for them if you have to.)

The lifestyle I am referring to involves taking the hard, laborious, difficult, near-impossible, and self-depreciating road to situations that you could just not give a shit about.

I am talking about looking at the Gospels and doing the very things that Jesus did and not cutting corners; not doing it except when it makes you uncomfortable but rather doing it even more when you are uncomfortable.

Somewhere along the way I got it in my head that being a Christian meant that I would have a good job, great friends, a cute wife, nice kids, a white picket fence, and lots of suits and ties...however NONE of that has ANYTHING to do with following Jesus' example.

In fact those things are the exact opposite of what it means to drop everything and follow Jesus. In scripture Jesus sends out his disciples without a pack, without sandals, without a staff(see Luke 10)...he basically sends them out naked!!! Because, like throughout all of the history of man, God had to do something where no one could say that man had control. But rather that there would be no doubt that To God Alone Be The Glory!

When God calls out Gideon(see Judges 6-7) he cuts his numbers drastically and yet he delivers them into victory, they stood in the face of defeat and death but he brought them through. God watched as the apostle Paul was stoned outside of town, then watched as Paul got up, with his body broken and bleeding, and went right back into the very town that had just tried to kill him.(see Acts 14:19-20)

God did not create us to live comfortable and easy lives...he created us to need him. God made man with a hole in him ( and not the hypothetical hole that Jesus builds a cabin in to spend summers and Christmas with us) but a hole that would bring man to this point in his life where he is at the end of rope where he has nowhere to look but to God.

Why would a loving God do this??? Why would a God who says he will never leave us or forsake us do that??

Because...

God created us incomplete so that he could take us up in his hands and he could complete us! God made us with a future in mind, not a prosperous future, a future that would involve tears, yelling, and a feeling of emptiness so that he could look us in the eyes and help us realize that he has been there the whole time(remember that whole never leave you part?) and that He is ready and willing to fill that void and really he already has. (see Deuteronomy 31:6, Joshua 1:5, I Kings 8:57, I Chronicles 28:20, Psalm 37:28, Psalm 94:14, Hebrews 13:5 and so many more.)

SO....anyway to the point I am making with this...

There are many options out there and as the Proverbs tell us "In his heart every man chooses a path and the Lord determines his steps"(see Proverbs 16:9) , and God is with us on this journey because it is his journey not ours anyway.

All this to say, Take a look at your life. Find something that is comfortable, and drop it. Take it out of your life, and replace it with God. Many of us look at this past Lenten season as a time to do this ( and succeed in not drinking soda or coffee for about two weeks). But what I am talking about is not a piece of your life I am talking about a piece of your lifestyle. Maybe it is driving ( if you drive to somewhere that is only a mile away simply because it is easier.) or maybe it is passing up the homeless man on the street, or maybe it is ignoring your roommate because they annoy you.

I encourage you to look at what makes your life easier and instead of it making your life easier try to make it where it makes another persons life easier. I am pretty darn sure that is what Jesus meant for us to do, at least that is what I have begun to perceive...

For lack of a better orator

I recently wrote a story to portray an event that occurred to one of my friends this past week. The hope , as I send this off to the Free-Press papers here in Houston, is that this gets published and people will learn from it. I can only hope that you read, and enjoy the following story and that it will cause you to rethink how you perceive others...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Life of a Houston Artist…

Don Collins awoke the morning of Tuesday February 9^th as he always does. He shook himself from his sleepy state and got ready for the day. After preparing for the day in his normal morning ritual he started out for his favorite coffee shop. Don does not drive; he walks. Don arrived at Taft St Coffee, the coffee shop that serves as both his studio and muse, and began to converse with his friends and those he does not know. Don draws people, places and things as they appear to him. After Don had finished at Taft St. he headed out for his next destination, a destination he would not reach.

As Don was crossing the road he heard the sound of an oncoming car so he instinctively sped up his pace to cross the street before becoming the next Houstonian to be the victim of a vehicular accident. After reaching the opposite curb Don heard the same car slam on its brakes and as he turned he saw that it was a Houston Police Department cruiser. By the time Don had turned around the passenger side officer was already out of the car walking toward him. Don is not a stranger to the H.P.D. and he knew what was coming. What followed was a horrible display of profiling by the HPD officers.

The first officer asked Don why he was walking so fast and requested to see his identification. The officer proceeded to ask Don who he was and tell him that he had never seen him in “their” neighborhood before. The next question was a forceful request to search Don’s backpack for his “crack pipe”; Don does not smoke crack. Upon searching his pack, much to the chagrin of Don’s personal rights, they discovered a bag of Crayola colored pencils (let me remind you Don is an Artist) and the officers proceeded to ask Don if he was a “pedophile”. The fact that the possession of colored pencils is enough for the police to think that someone is a pedophile is absurd, but also that they would ask such an audacious question to Don based off of the contents of his bag is overwhelmingly upsetting. Also during this absurd police investigation a mid-twenties African American man happened to be walking by and he received a harsh greeting and rude questioning as to his destination and reason for being where he was.

Upon searching through their records they found that Don had a few outstanding tickets and decided to take him in to process him through the system. The first holding cell that Don was placed in was a twenty-man cell that had about forty or fifty men in it. After several hours Don was moved to a smaller cell with three other men, one of whom was suffering from some mental ailments and had been in the cell for longer then he should have been in that situation. Don continually requested to talk with a superior officer (which is something that one of his cell-mates had for the previous two days) and was repeatedly told to talk to the next shift-captain, of which he saw about three come and go. Don finally went before a judge to deal with his delinquent tickets and copped a plea so that the frustrating madness would come to a more concise end. His tickets were written off after he spent some more time in his cell and was subsequently released.

As previously stated, Don is not a stranger to the HPD. In fact, they harass Don quite often. On top of being a wonderful artist, very friendly conversationalist and traveling philosopher, Don is also homeless. It is an upsetting fact that just because Don has the appearance of a homeless man and was walking faster than some police officer decided that he should have been, he was the subject of situational profiling and the harassment that comes with it. No man, whether he goes home to a multi-million dollar house or a pad made from cardboard and thrift-store blankets, should be subjected to such inhumane treatment. Don had not done anyone direct or even indirect harm in that situation and aside from his appearance and supposed unfamiliar presence in the neighborhood the officers had no feasible reason to “pull him over”.

This situation was upsetting to Don, but even more upsetting to those who care about him. Don is a kind and generous man to everyone both friend and stranger alike. Over the Christmas season Don sold cards based off of his paintings at Taft St Coffee and donated all the proceeds to the church that he has been attending so that they could dig fresh water wells over-seas. He is an accomplished artist, and a brilliant intellectual, nothing about him says dangerous, harmful, or even scary. This situation brings into questioning the methods by which our HPD officers are deciding who is and is not criminal. I can only hope that this situation will bring an inquiry into the police department and their practices of profiling.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

re-post this, do whatever it is you can to make sure this story is heard.

Thanks,

Ike

this is a picture of Don talking with my friend Andy

Redemption...

OK so it has been awhile since I have "Blogged" and there are a lot of things I could blog about but I would like to talk with you about my art, and how it has changed me...

For those of you who did not know in the last few years I have begun to paint quite often...I began painting as a means of cheap Christmas gifts for my Mother and Sisters and it became something I enjoyed very much...and now is something that I am quite passionate about. When I moved to Houston to do Mission Year I wasn't sure how that would affect my painting but I knew it would do a great deal of work on me, and it did. I began (mostly to cut cost) painting on objects that I found on the side of the road. At first this was just an interesting and cheap way to put ideas down on "canvas" but it quickly took a turn as I realised what was occurring.
I was taking objects that people had thrown out, discarded, and found useless and I was bringing out their redemptive beauty. I was improving the quality of derelict objects that were other-wise cluttering up the street corners of our neighborhood. One day as I was trying to figure out what to paint on a piece of tile that I had found I realized that this is what Christ does...Jesus through his love looks at people, especially the derelict people of our society, and sees their redemptive beauty immediately...He does not have to search for it, he doesn't have to imagine it and create it because it is already there and he sees it clear as day...In Psalm 139 it says that God knew us in our mothers womb and that he knit us in before and behind...God has always known how beautiful of people we would be and has always seen us as such...
This thought began to represent itself in my art and through that began to bleed into the rest of my life especially in how I see people...I began to look at the wonderful children at the school I work at here in Houston's third ward and try to see the beauty that Christ sees in them no matter what they do...God sees a beauty in us because he created us and because we are his children and no matter how much we mess up or how hateful we are toward him he still sees us through that lens of Love.
My heart began to ache as I realized that other people do not realize this...Other people do not see these children as beautiful, they do not see my homeless friends as beautiful. I know they don't because if they did they would do something to help...If people truly saw the redemptive beauty that God grants each one of us then the sweet six year old girls I know don't have to wake up to mom and dad cooking crack in the kitchen instead of breakfast, if people saw the beauty then my friend who sits on the side of the road wouldn't be harassed out of her home by the department of transportation just because her home is under a bridge. If people saw the beauty that Christ sees then they would not be able to pay to have a teenage girl kid-napped off the streets of Houston and shipped off into the sex slave industry, Children wouldn't grow up in dangerous neighborhoods without a father, Men and Women wouldn't have to beg for food, and women would not have to sell their bodies to provide for their children...As I sit here weeping for the lovely people I have met and who will always be on my heart I understand that it is harsh of me to ask you to see them with the lens that God does but according to Dorothy Day "Love is a harsh and dreadful thing to ask, but it is the ONLY answer" GO d loves us not because of our societal standings, or how much money we have but because he created us...he created all of us. One person is not more important than another we are ALL God's children and we should act accordingly.

This is something that I believe in very much and I will now and forever do whatever I can to get people to view the hurting and the outcast with the same aching heart that God does because if we see that Beauty then the hurting stops....

Thank you and God Bless

Isaac Rice

Waiting...

When you live in the City you wait in line for everything. You wait for food, the bathroom, computers at the library ( which is where I am now ). You wait for red lights to turn to green lights, wait for red hands to turn to white men walking ( or green men walking if you find your self in Europe). And if you live in Houston you definitely wait on the METRO.
One aspect of this year is our constant dependency on the public transit system here in Houston. The METRO, as it is called, is not the best system in the U.S. when it comes to public transit but it is not the worst either. Though there is one aspect that is always infused with the metro and that is waiting...
When my teammates and I get off of one bus to transfer to another the question isn't where do we go it is how long do we wait. In most aspects it is more beneficial for you to walk the direction you are heading and hope that when the bus comes by you are near enough to a stop that you can flag it down.
I will say one thing though, I have grown to love waiting for the bus, or at least I try, I realized this week while waiting for the bus that I always take to Yellowstone Academy, is that I am not waiting on the Bus the bus is Waiting on me! The METRO wasn't set up so that I could criticize it and be upset that it is late but rather the METRO was setup to help me reach my destination without having to walk fifteen miles round trip everyday.
I have found many ways to make the time pass quickly while waiting on a bus, however the thing I have found that makes time pass better then reading, talking to the other people waiting, or even complaining( my initial attempt to make time fly by) is trusting that the lord has his time and that the bus is running on that. For some reason the bus is late and I will be late but that is exactly what God wants.
There have been many times where my teammates and I have had to run to catch buses and other times when we miss buses, but almost every time that my team and I or even just myself have missed a bus and had to wait on the next we have met new friends or seen old ones. Those social collisions would not have happened if we had driven, or caught the earlier bus, or taken our friend up on the ride home. In "New Neighbor" by Leroy Barber the president of Mission Year there is a section that asks a simple question "would Jesus drive?" In this little section of the book the writer talks about an instance on the bus where the bus was late and was taking its time on its route but then it had to stop for about five minutes to allow a woman in a wheel chair to get on. People had to get out of their seats on an already crowded bus, but no one griped or grumbled. Why? because they all knew the woman and in fact instead of complaining they were all talking to her and being congenial. For a moment people stopped worrying about being on time and stopped worrying about having to wait and instead enjoyed the simple interactions of human connection.
This is not meant to be an attack on those who use and own cars, because most of our country is built on an automobile centered society and blah blah blah. However if you live in a city with public transit try it out see what people use all the time and put your self in their shoes. You never know you may be sitting on the bus and next thing you know Jesus is sitting next to you.


I know this is a loaded topic and it doesn't make much sense but I only have so much time on the computer in the library...I will talk about this more however.


I love you all
Ike

A thorn among lilies...without restrain.

This past weekend my team and I attended a speaking engagement around the Galleria area of Houston. First off the Galleria is the perfect example of American consumerism and therefore as my teammates and I drove through on our way to the event we were amazed by the amount of money that goes into some things and the lack of money that goes into others.
At the conference we were blessed to hear from a Franciscan Monk of the third order. His name was Chris Webb and he is president of the organization named Renevare, he is subsequently the subject of this blog.
Chris is a practicing Franciscan Monk (weird robe and all) he spoke this past weekend on what else but St. Francis. Chris' ideas were not entirely new to my teammates and I but to the rest of the crowd it was breathtakingly extreme and new.
While there were many things I pulled from our time there the one thing I would like to talk about is the mission question that Chris proposed.

"What does it mean for me to follow Christ without reserve?"

Chris told a story of a conversation he had during his first thoughts of joining the Franciscan lifestyle. He was talking to a friend in a frenzy saying how it sounded crazy to just give everything away he was saying how you can't just give everything away and his friend simply said "Why Not?"...

So Chris' question for people is now Do you have anything better to do?
What is holding all of us back? What is keeping us from following Christ? Why is there reservation in our walk with him?

Simply put there should not be reservation and if there is we should be doing everything we can to rid our selves of reservation.

Look at your walk. If there is reservation ( and we all have them some are obvious some are not) then seek God's wisdom to find the ways to rid your self of any reservation.

I am calling this a thorn among lilies because what we are called to do is not comfortable it is not the normal lifestyle in our society If you follow it you will be a thorn in the side of those who desire to be comfortable and you will stick out.

"Love is a harsh and dreadful thing to ask of us, but it is the only answer." Dorothy Day

We are called to live a life of unconditional love. A love that is unending, a blind love, and a love that has nothing holding it back.

Love God, Love People nothing else matters!


Love
Ike