Here we are...

... full from a delicious dinner that Greg whipped up in a matter of minutes consisting of homemade egg noodles, eggplant parmesan, and tomatoes from our garden.

Sitting around listening to music... a beautiful thing this is. A good and beautiful thing without a doubt. Somehow it still feels hard, and a bit gray. The suffering that is constant all around us, all the time, feels heavy. We are trying to learn to have fun and enjoy life in the midst of all the heaviness. Time will help. Prayer and conservation probably will too.

I also think I have some of my own soul searching to do... some things to deal with... some feelings and emotions to sort though... and I need to choose my words carefully.

In other news, we have another person moving in this coming month. A guy from PA who is looking for an escape and, through some mutual friends, found us to put him up for a few months. This will bring our grand total to 8. We will surely keep each other warm this winter. I am really looking forward to providing some longer term hospitality to a brother in need.

On that note, off to enjoy silence... and search around my soul and my scattered mind a bit...

I'll leave you with some love from the Buddha...

"Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence."

From Kelly's blog...

My thoughts exactly...

" Tonight at femma we wrote letters to legislators regarding domestic violence as a pre-existing condition for health insurance coverage and baked chocolate-chip cookies. Even while passionate letters were handwritten, a funk hung about the group, not unlike the funk that has been plaguing us the past few weeks.

It is hard to live in this neighborhood. When the boys lived here and we drove in from Cville almost nightly, I didn’t notice it. There’s something about the hopelessness that permeates every street corner interaction or handful of broken glass littering the street. Though the neighborhood was the first settled of our state, the trees are young and small. Everything is decayed and nothing is colorful except for neon signs and pawn shop windows– and even those are covered with “the Franklinton film.” That’s what I call the dull and filmy coat hanging over everything from Mount Carmel to the Hilltop. Cigarette smoke, city pollution, oil and dirt rubbed off of last months clothes, and spilled Cobra. This morning biking to street church, Ashley heard a man yelling violently at his wife (an obscenely regular occurence on front porches and streets) and she yelled, “I HATE THIS PLACE!”

It’s just that ills are not kept behind walls in Franklinton. Everything is so overwhelmingly not behind walls that it is, in fact, strewn all over the overgrown lawn. It is this explicitness that makes for a difficult transition. Or, at least, a sudden and undiluted one.

We do have new neighbors to our left, which we have been waiting for. It is a family of six, and the three boys play football in our front median. They are a delightful family– we have already gotten to share some tomatoes and yard tools with them. So far we have seen them communicate very lovingly and respectfully to each other, which is a relief.

It is nice to finally see our homeless friends in passing throughout the week instead of at one designated time, and indeed helps the area feel like home. I would feel more threatened by random passersby if they didn’t smile familiarly and call us “sissy.”

I paint a bleak picture. It’s what I see but not what I hope for."