Friday Afternoon at the Garden

I am writing this post from Dearborn MI, my hopefully soon-to-be home.

Williamson Street Community Garden lies just two blocks from the world famous Shatila Bakery. If you like baklava or other Middle Eastern sweets, you have to visit Shatila. Most of the residents in the area hail from Palestine, Iraq, or elsewhere in the Middle East.

We pulled up to the alley entrance of the garden with a load of supplies, everything you need to finish a wooden bench and secure a wooden rack for two compost barrels.

As we were unloading the car, an old Arab man from two houses down smiled and waved at us. He showed us a couple of big tomatoes from his own garden. We didn't have any ripe tomatoes yet. A few minutes later, he stopped by to chat with us for a bit.

The kids started coming after about 15 minutes. First one or two, and soon seven or eight, ranging from ages 3 to 10 or so. Shaddy, the 18 or 19 old brother of a couple of the kids came across the street and stayed a while.  He made plans with my companions about going together to a police auction the next day. He was hoping to score a motorcycle.

Shaddy left and one of my coworkers got out the trash picker sticks. The kids started getting excited as kids often do. He had been keeping them in suspense for a few days with a promise that they could use the trash pickers around their neighborhood.

The kids took off with the trash pickers They returned a few minutes later to get a bag to actually put the trash in. Then they went up and down the street picking up trash. They made an impromptu game of it, assigning point values to pieces of trash based us size and uniqueness. The fast food napkin was worth one point. The coke bottle was worth about five points. The rusty muffler that had fallen off of a car, twenty.

After the job was done and the trash pickers put away the kids just stayed. This was their place. They felt safe and comfortable with us. We played with them, giving them piggy back rides and racing each other with kids on our back. Brown skin rubbing against white skin, shrieks, giggles, lots of smiles.

As we worked at the garden several other neighbors stopped by or greeted us as they passed. A mere three months ago, the city gave our fledgling organization, Neighborhood Growth Initiatives, permission to put up our first community garden on this empty lot. A lot has happened in that time.

We got a grant to place 40 raised garden beds. Most of them are tended by individual members of the neighborhood, with a few community plots open to all. They are all full of vegetables, several ripening.

Neighborhood gardens are about a lot more than just food. They create a sense of community. They bring people together. Many of the neighbors are from different nationalities and may not actually know each other. How many of your neighbors do you know? Neighborhood gardens get people out and meeting their neighbors. That reduces crime. It eases ethnic tensions. It makes the streets safer for kids.

A lady  with a black and white polka dot hijab (head scarf) called us over as she was about to get into her car. She handed us a small wad of cash. "I really want to help you guys out." She said. "You are doing good work here... really good work."

We plant vegetables and hope. Jesus said he came to bring "good news to the poor." (Luke 4:18). We can't fix the worlds problems, but we can bring something good to a neighborhood, maybe even a city. When we do we aren't just doing some humanitarian good deed. Our work goes beyond meeting a temporal need. We are following Jesus, working in his name, and bringing a hope that glistens with eternity.

Are We Serving or Helping?

Jesus is a helpful guy - not in the sense of taking out the trash for me, or giving me tips on what to buy my wife for her birthday.  But his very nature, the bulk of his ministry, was helping people with some problem or another.  He healed a lot of sick people.  Raised a few dead.  He gave some free meals.  He provided a lot of practical life advice mixed in with his teachings about the "kingdom."  He helped people in practical ways.  He changed lives for the better.

It seems like as his followers we should be helping people.  He kind of made that explicit in his teaching: love your neighbor (Matt 22:39), give to anyone who asks (Luke 6:30), heal the sick (Luke 10:9).  He expects us, his body on the earth, to do what he did.  

Recently my church took part in a day of service in our community.  I learned that we do this every year at about the same time.  People in the lower income neighborhoods we serve have come to expect us.  They usually have some ideas of projects that need to have done when we come around.  One landlord told his tenets he would not do needed repairs, because he knew the church people would be around soon and they could do it.

I was discussing this with some friends afterward.  There seemed to be a consensus that we were not making a difference in the community.  The same people were in the same pitiful place as they were last year.  Some people were growing weary of returning year after year and not seeing any progress in the community.  It brought a smile to faces for one day, but if anything, the community was in worse shape than it was the year before.

Why on earth would we expect a community to change form a one-day-a-year service project?  I think if you had asked us what we expected to happen before the first time anyone went into that neighborhood, we would have said something like, "We expect to serve God by serving others."  or, "We expect to live out the love of Jesus."  If that is all we really went out to do, then we succeeded.  We showed people the love of Jesus in a practical way.  We served them like Jesus said to when he washed his disciples feet.  We succeeded!

Somewhere along the way we developed new expectations.  We expected to not only serve people, but to help people.  We expected to heal people, to feed people, to make their lives better.  And we failed.

My group of friends has recently decided to adopt a neighborhood where a couple of us live so we can spend the time to really help people.  We are going to be spending time there, getting to know people, and doing projects with the people of the neighborhood.  We realize helping and serving are not the same thing.  Serving is a single act.  Helping is a process.  It is a process that is often messy, and difficult to measure.  Helping is a relationship that takes time to build.  To really help, you need to find out not only what a person or community is lacking, but what a person or community has to offer.  Then you have to empower them to use what God has given them to change their situation.

I think a lot of Jesus' followers have wrapped their minds around serving   We can go in, do something, leave,  and feel pretty good about ourselves at the end of the day.  Most of us have not really invested enough to actually help someone, let alone to help a community.  I think Jesus wants us to do both.