the week. and then some.

as promised. pictures. check 'em here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jmukes7?feat=email

so. it's been a crazy week, but a fantastic one. here is what went down.

5.22-5.24: we left friday for the retreat. had some bonding time friday night. saturday, team building, mccormick's creek scavenger hunt, prayer labyrinth (sooo cool), worship time with Psalms, more bonding. sunday. church as Mano de Amistad, the spanish speaking church in englewood. barely understood a word, but the goal of the summer is to learn spanish...and guitar. :]. had authentic mexican food, running, and a night downtown followed by Presidents and SCUM!

{{the FAM.}}

Jenna, Marsha, Andrew Me and Jill

Tracy, Nick, Joe, Elizabeth

Megan M., Megan B., Kelsey5.25: breakfast at 8:00. it was not so bad at the beginning of the week, but by friday, i struggled. we went over some stuff and went out for a neighborhood tour. honestly, it was really hard not to get really mad at God. there is alot of brokeness and at times it seemed so hopeless...so much stuff, how do you help everyone. it was encouraging to see how the church we are staying with is really focused on community development and is very intentional about the things they are involved with and being "IN" the community.
**and. we got ALL the VBS crafts done for the summer. usually it takes them a few nights to get them all done...but we worked it out. and they are done. all in about 4 hours. :]

5.26: the interns went on a homeless simulation (definately no urban weekend...haha) and jill and i were able to help out at an organization called Joy's House in broadripple just cleaning. they are an adult daycare for adults with disabilities and the elderly and they just added...still are building...more space onto their facility. it was also great to hear what the other interns learned about the city and their experience and different ministries in the area...

the brothel: so. i think i mentioned this in another post, but within the big church parking lot, there is a warehouse with a police outpost. also. across the street is a brothel...actually there are two in the area...but the specific one i am talking about has been around for at least 3 years, if not more. with the police right across the street. now. as i heard about this, i came to find that the police know, and they might take action, but only when the neighbors get fed up and call them. otherwise. they use the brothel as a place to catch people dealing drugs. they don't think prostitution is a big deal...or a crime worth dealing with. so. i was furious. about ready to dial the national trafficking hotline and have them bust up the place. i had a good talk with the pastor about it and it is just a sad situtation.
then i thought. if the brothel is raided. where will the women go? do any of them have skills to get a normal job? do any have a place to live? how long have some of the girls been there...they probably know nothing else. and they would also probably be back on the street again, just in a different location. so. what would raiding the brothel actually do?? as i thought. it actually seemed like the brothel would be a better place for the girls because at least they won't be sleeping on the streets...but there is not one ministry/agency in Indianapolis that specifically caters to helping prostitutes......i think i really need to start one.

5.27: so this lady had a big trip with her kids for school and ended up having left over chips. alot. so she carried them with her on her way to work downtown, which was a pretty far walk. well she ended up giving the chips to homeless people on the street. and she kept on doing it until she became the chip lady. now. 10 years later. she makes enough lunches to feed about 60-100 people a day. she has a space in her building downtown, has volunteers help pack lunches and take their own lunch breaks to help prepare and pass out lunches, and has a transitional housing program for the homeless. crazyness. we helped prepare lunches today. what an awesome ministry. we sang a song in OneVoice called "2 little fish"...'with 2 little fish, and 5 loaves of bread, 5,000 hungry souls my Jesus fed...Jesus can work it out, Jesus can work it, work it...' amazing what He can do with 2 fish and 5 loaves. :]
**we also did VBS lesson planning tonight. so fun. good skits. i will be working with some very creative and fun people. im excited :].

5.28: WORK PROJECT! dug a trench...(papa C. i was literally working in the trenches!), scrapped some paint. good times.
**we did VBS puppets tonight. i will admit, i was not too fond of the puppets, but after watching the interns put on puppet shows. i find them quite enjoyable. we got DQ for snack :]

5.29: went to rebuilding the wall, my MINISTRY!!, and talked to chris. wow. such great stuff to say. talked about realizing how unique we all are. loving your brother, treating your neighbor like you want to be treated...that doesn't mean giving away last years tennis shoes to someone and then buying a new pair for yourself. would you want last years shoes? alot about community development. FEAR. whah! this stuff was so good...about not being afraid of what people say and how fear always holds us back. (it had been a LONG week by this point...and not that i fell asleep as he said this stuff, i just had a lot in my brain from the week, so i'm still trying to put it all together.)
i love rebuilding the wall. the issues they stand for (justice!), the things they are involved in, the way they live out their faith and their passion for community development.
**had dinner with the host families. my family is so great. such CUTE KIDDOS. 4 of them. just like home.

5.30: got a haircut. it's ridiculously short. like 1-1 1/2 inches long. bah. i feel like a boy. hung out downtown and got some south bend chocolate company icecream. like heaven.

5:31: church. mexican food. soccer. pizza, PRES/SCUM, and mulan at mi casa.

long, good, challenging week. i just LOVE community development and just hearing about all that is going on. more on this later, since this is way long...
something that is challenging. realizing that God is working in the midst of all the brokeness. satan is trying to tear me down, but i need to keep focusing on Jesus.

**ps. joseph was half-alive this afternoon, floating on his side when i returned home. it gave me a bit of a fright...i actually was freaking out a bit. i think he just missed me. i changed his water and he seemed good when i left. pray that he does not die. because i would be sooo sad. :[

all for now. more to come.

peace.

[teach me your ways, O Lord, and i will walk in your turth. give me an undivided heart, that i may fear your name. i will praise you, O Lord my God, with all my heart. i will glorify your name forever. for great is Your love towards me, You have delivered me from the depths of the grave]
God, you are mighty to save, you are mighty to save...

picture time

today is the day...that all the interns come!!!

i'm so excited!

last night. we hung out downtown. ran a bit on the canal and then walked around taking pictures. what fun! here a few of my favs.

well...there is one pic. this is taking too long to put up. check for more sometime soon. :]

we're all bastards, but God loves us anyways

another post already. but this is important stuff. delicious food for thought. :]

we are reading Mere Discipleship for MI. its a tough book, but when you pay attention and understand what he is saying...it's crazy. i feel like half of my pages are underlined and i have writing all in the margins.

this section on worship, talked about war and loving your enemies.
the beginning talks about why Christians should oppose war. i have been struggling through this idea for a while, whether or not to support war or not. jill and i were talking and she said its hard because we are supposed to love our neighbor, but at the same time, we are called to support our brothers and sisters fighting for our freedom. so. some quotes from the book.

' confessing 'Jesus is Lord' means taking Jesus seriously as Lord, as the authority for the believer: Caesar commands us to kill our enemies, but Jesus cammands us to love them...Jesus calls us to forgiveness and holiness...it is for this reason that Christians ought not to kill thier enemies. christian nonviolence is not rooted merely in a few proof texts from the Sermon on the Mount or other Gospel accounts of the teaching of Jesus. Much more, Christian nonviolence flows out of the entire narrative of redemption and floows immediately from worshiping the God revealed in the slaughtered Lamb. disciples do not advocate nonviolence because of an 'optimistic' assessment of human nature. Christians do not advocate nonviolence becauser they naively believe that 'being nice to people' always makes people 'be nice' in returen. nor do Christians advocate nonviolence because they simply assume that we can 'all get along.' the narrative of redemption is more realistic than this... we do not fight wars because the kingdom of God has come, in which war is banished, in which it is possible to order our lives according to the justice and peace of God. Christian nonviolence is always rooted in the narrative of redemption.'

good stuff.

then. he goes on to talk about loving our enemies...which is very hard for me. studying trafficking and prostitution this year had been good in that i am gaining knowledge and developing a passion to help girls. but i get so angry at these men who take advantage of young girls and think that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing...

'the point of the gospel is not that we love the 'good people' and hate the 'bad people,' but that we love as God loves, unclusively, extravagantly.' the fear deep within us rebels at such love, balks at such indiscriminate grace, recoils at such wholesale forgiveness. such love appears to cut across the grain of our souls..such love refuses to take sides, refuses to play the power games, refuses to simplistically see one class of people as 'good' and the others as 'evil.' such love...is the hard owrk of self-sacrificially giving for the true good of another, who desperately needs to be loved...victory comes only through love.'

you know what this means. Jesus love those men who abuse women, who hurt kids, who sexually expliot young girls. they are sinners just like me. i am called to love them. but, gosh, it is hard!

ultimately though, for trafficking and prostitution to stop, we must deal with the demand. we can teach the girls all we want, work tirelessly to keep them safe and help as many as we can, but unless we love the men like Christ does, nothing will change. it is so easy to help the victim, but so much hard to help the abuser...but they need Christ just as much as the victim. ah. sometimes i hate when God hits me on the head with a 2 by 4. so. im praying that walls and barriers, I PUT UP, will be knocked down and that i could have a Christ like love for these men and women. it's hard...

'the opposite of love, for John (1 John 2:4-6, 4:20), is not apathy --pointing us yet again to the fact that 'love' out not to be construed as a feeling, but as an action, self-sacrificially acting for the good of another.'

peace.

hear the cries (sirens) of the city...

it has been an eventful few days.

saturday. jill and i went to a wedding for this couple who go to the church we are staying next too. of course, we had no niice clothes so we went the wedding, people we have never met by the way, in jeans and a t-shirts :]. we snuck out the back to help serve dinner and got to eat some delicous food...including Red Velet Cake!! i met my host family too...such cute kiddos. then we explored downtown Indy and walked the Canal. i've lived no more than 30 minutes away from downtown Indy all my life and i never realized how cool it is.

monday. i went to our last rebuilding the wall x-treme Jesus crew for the school year. it was a fantastic time to just hang out and enjoy my girls. we had DELICIOUS food!!! i remember when i first started at RtW and i saw that Mary had put me in the girl's class and I was asking God what He was thinking...but now, i never knew i could love a group of girls so much. they have taught me so much more than i ever thought i could teach them and i would do anything for them. im glad i will be around a bit this summer, but im nervous for going back to school next year...

btw. im basically coming back to CU. Jesus is working it out! :]

a few observations:

i have been in the house since thursday. not one night has gone by without hearing sirens, at least once, if not more. not one night...

as you drive down Washington street, there is an empty parking lot across from a gas station. Hispanics will stand/sit all day long, waiting for someone to come and hire them for the day to work. at the end of the day, most get paid...but there are those few that do not get paid. they are taken advantage of and because some are undocumented, they most definately have no one to report to about not getting paid. with my social work mind and heart, i'm thinking of a solution...

outside our house is a playground and the kids from the school in the church play on it each night as we head home, and, of course, we always end up going out to play. i was sitting next to this 4-year old boy named Michael, and he was telling me about the kids he didn't like and how he wanted to fight them and kill them and use his gun. a 4 -year-old child. is talking about killing people. with guns. thinking that it is okay. everything is about violence. even with my RtW girls...fighting. we desperately have to teach our children another way of dealing with things. an eye for an eye and the whole world will end up blind...

problems never have one solution here...you have to peel back layers of the onion to find out the root cause. and, you probably cannot fix it all yourself. you need community. [[go to the people. live among them. learn from them. love them. start with what they know. build on what they have: but the best of the leaders. when their task is done. the people will remark 'we have done it ourselves']]

lecrae has some of the best, most beautiful, truthful lyrics i have ever heard. if you don't like rap, listen to his stuff anyways...

Jesus IS in the city...you may not see Him at first glance, or second, or third, it may take a long time to realize it...but HE is here.

**pictures to come.

BEAUTiFUL FEET

so. i have never had a blog before, but there are so many things i want to tell everyone about my summer so far, and i figured this would be the best way to do it!

i have almost completed my first training week at Mission Indy. It has been busy, but so great! I am literally in charge of the whole VBS program, which is sweet. I moved into my small house in the city last night with another intern. there is a playground right outside our backyard, (the playground and this house belong to this church that is so cool and helps out so much in the community. being the hands and feet of Jesus) so we played with the kids that go to school in the church. so fun. then we ventured out to find food and ended up making delicious spinach salad with chicken, peppers, tomatoes, and feta chesse, with strawberries and wheat thins! :]

the past two days, i was able to visit all my VBS sites and organize the crazy storage closet. the cool thing about this ministry is that we get to do VBS in a trailer part (rural poverty), in the inner city, and in a institutional facility for kids with developmental and emotional delays/disabilities. i am so excited that i get to be a part of this and i am so excited for the church groups that we will be working with each week to help put the VBS program on.

last night, the other intern, Jill, and i just sat and talked for like 2 hours about injustice, and poverty, inner city ministry, racial reconciliation, and God's heart and God's love. we talked about how hard it is to talk to some people about inner city ministry and poverty and race because so people just don't want to listen. those issues are so close to the heart of God it is crazy. if we actually take time to read about Jesus and His ministry, we will see right there that He was all about Justice!

well. i am just so excited about this summer. i get to live with a host family who has four kids (haha...just like home :]) and i am "interning/volunteering" at the Care Center for women who struggle with homelessness and DV. it's funny because this is not what i expected to be doing this summer...i wanted to work with young girls caught in prostitution or something like that. but it is so cool to see how God worked it all out for me to be here this summer and the postition He put me in.

so. i have been listening to Lecrae non-stop. his lyrics are BEAUTIFUL and he speaks so much truth. beautiful feet is one of my favorite songs. and something i think is really applicable to what i'm doing this summer and just a song that i think alot of people need to hear...it's encouraging and challenging.

thanks for reading. im not really sure how long these are supposed to be...but it's my blog, so i guess i can make it however long i want. :] i'll be updating through the summer.

peace.

Carlos was born in killa cali/ was walking down an alley/ he caught a bullet in his head that left him bleeding badly. He lost everything at that moment except his life/ he lost his hearing, lost his movement and he lost his sight/ he laid there in a coma/ but man nobody cared/ the Gospel preached in his neighborhood? Nobody dared/ But los got up out the coma got and was able to hear/ a missionary shared the gospel to his open ears/ He got saved got trained got discipled/ back to the hood/ you could find em preaching the bible/ He led a homie to Christ from his same hood/ part of Church plant/ come on now aint his name good/ This is blessing but I'm stressing that this is not the norm/ we need leaders and believers to help carry it on/ but who would minister in a sinister part of town/ I pray if Jesus is calling you that you would be found/
Eric used to go to bible study as a kid/ he got older and started doing what the hood did/ a rival gang caught him slippin tried to take his life/ but then the gun jammed up so them beat him nice/ he woke up in the hospital singing bible songs/ praise God he had a place to learn the bible from/ but then he gets saved and wanna preach Christ they make him change his whole culture and whole way of life/ he gotta get him a bachelors wear a suit and tie/ go to seminary/ by then all of his boys will die/ Jesus came to invade culture outta Nazareth and used a couple fisherman who people saw as hazardous/ the feet are beautiful if only they'd go/ if ain't nobody in hood preaching how will they know?/ Eric is better used taught trues in his context/ somebody please plant a church in his projects.
In Luke 4:16 on down to 21 Jesus says he's messiah says he's the chosen oneBut more than that he quotes Isaiah/ that shows our savior targets oppressed captive blind and the broke I'm saying/ He had a heart for the poor had a heart for the low/ and 1st John 2:6 is way we should go/ In Deuteronomy even tho they under the law/ the tithes every third year the poor got em all/ I ain't sayin you wrong if you live in burbs/ Im sayin turn your attention to the hood cause we hurting/ man if you ain't burdened please pick up your word an/ tho this world is going down while we here we can serve him/ we bring this to the streets because we knew the streets/ I pray that more would be burdened to have beautiful feet/ you never knew the streets but truth is what you preach/ I pray to God you'd be burdened for beautiful feet.
Go, go, go (run with those beautiful feet)Go, go, goYou hold the truth that saves so run and shout it to the worldThey can't believe in something they ain't never heardGo, go, go and run with those beautiful feet