Our ministry site this week was the warehouse/office building owned by Here’s Life Inner City. They are relocating soon, so our task today was packing up computers and boxes of office supplies for the move to the new location. It was pretty tedious work at times, but I appreciated the change of pace from working with kids the past three weeks. Also, we as a team got a chance to work together, talk together, and joke around with each other while we were working. We also took the train to and from the work site this week, and it seems to be a much faster way of getting around L.A. if it goes where you’re going.
After dinner on Monday, we had a guest speaker, Larry Dove, from Emmanuel Church here in Los Angeles to speak with us about racial and ethnic reconciliation and diversity. He really made us think a lot and he had us discuss with each other our own views on diversity and Jesus' view of diversity.
On the train on the way home Tuesday I met a man from the Ivory Coast (living in Long Beach) named Kouassi Kouame. He was trying to find a particular address in Burbank. I left the team and got off with him to try to help him find that place, but we were unsuccessful. So we both headed home, and he’ll try again tomorrow. I couldn’t really help him much, but he knew I was a Christian and he really appreciated me giving of my time for him. Later that night we had a great but long Bible study tonight about racial unity among believers, centered on the scripture passage from Acts about Peter and Cornelius.
Thursday we worked in Compton in the neighborhood a couple of the staff members are moving into. We worked especially on their soon-to-be house, stripping paint, blowing leaves, clearing brush, stripping sheetrock, powerwashing siding. It was difficult, physical labor, and my shower once we got home was amazing! It felt very good to be using our physical abilities in our work, and it felt good to be very tired out from a long day’s work.
Friday was a free day: very full, very fun, and very tiring. Matt, Bea, and both Hannahs went with me to Runyon Canyon Park up in the hills near the famous Hollywood sign. It was very rugged and steep terrain, and the ground was very dusty overall. We saw some sweet views overlooking the city from the peaks of some of the hills, and we even ate our lunch on one of the peaks. There were lots of people walking or running on the trails, and most of the people seemed to have a dog or two with them. We had quite a difficult time finding the right combination of buses to get us out to Santa Monica beach, our next destination. Santa Monica is the next city over from Venice, but it’s a night and day difference economically. We saw Porsche and Ferrari dealerships, coffee shops, an Apple store, clean streets, and almost no people of color in Santa Monica. The beach was very nice, and we spent a few hours there (just the right amount of time in my opinion). We played in the water for a bit, laid on towels to catch some rays for a while, and I played Frisbee with Matt, too. We took a Metro Rapid bus back from Santa Monica straight to downtown L.A. with only a handful of stops, which was nice, but with traffic the ride home still took well over an hour.
We were planning to eat at a Korean barbeque restaurant together as a project, but that didn’t work out because we got home much later than we expected. We were planning to attend a 7:30 concert at MacArthur Park near downtown. By the time we had showers and hurriedly ate dinner, it was almost 8 o’clock, and we headed to the concert. Ricardo Lemvo and his band played Afro-Cuban music with a lot of rhythm, such salsa songs. They had an electric guitarist, two trumpeters, a trombonist, a keyboard player, a guy on bongos, and a drumset player, and Ricardo played maracas and sang lead vocals. The music was great, and our little group went to the front area by the stage where people were dancing and joined in with our attempts at dancing (some were actually pretty good).
We participated in an outreach in Compton Saturday called the Compton Initiative. First of all, we got up at 6 a.m. for this outreach, which was of course not fun at all. Our team worked on painting murals at Dickison Elementary School. We painted over the top of an older mural to brighten its colors and painted a new mural for the first time. For a while it felt like we had too many hands working on not enough wall, but later in the morning, Luke and I got a chance to go up on the second level of scaffolding and we had plenty of area to paint up there. They fed us some breakfast before we started, and we had pizza for lunch. Once we returned home, I went straight for a nap, and I slept for two glorious hours. We made a spaghetti dinner as a project. We also made a late night run to Yogurt Land, which was fun and definitely tasty.
Yesterday we began working with a community center in Central City, a.k.a. Skid Row. This center works with kids from the area, most of whom are homeless or in poverty. On Mondays, they have a pool party with the kids at the suburban home of someone involved with the center. So a bus came and picked up us and the kids and the staff, and we had a fun day playing with the kids in and around the pool. The rest of the week we'll be spending time with teenagers. That's what we did today: we hung out with about 4 or 5 teens who came to the center, playing basketball, card games, and talking with them in the "Teen Room." During the school year, the main focus is on helping the kids with their homework and studies, but during the summer this is just a safe place for them to come and relax.
Also, last night was an amazing night of group prayer and confession. Several people surrendered to Christ burdens they had been carrying for a long time, in some cases burdens the rest of us didn't even know about. And we laid hands on each other and prayed for each other; none of this was even planned out before the evening began! There was more vulnerability with each other than we've had yet this summer, and there was so much healing and closeness because of that! And none of this was through our own responsibility; there's no doubt the Holy Spirit was working in the room and in our hearts. I was so very humbled to be working and living alongside people who have persevered through so much more than I can even imagine, and yet they still turn their burdens over to God and rely on His strength. Praise God! This is our last week working at ministry sites, but keep checking in because I plan to write at least one more time this summer. Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for reading!
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