It was broken.  And dirty.  And gross.  And I was able to be with them.  There were feces on the sidewalk and urine puddles rinsing our sandals.  It was drug-infested and prostitute-infected—and all in my own backyard.  

I spent yesterday in Skid Roe, touring the grounds and serving alongside a friend who works with Union Rescue Mission, as well as two ex-Tweakers (meth-addicts), ripe with memories grafting hellish days in this fifty block range.  The past couple weeks have found me itching to be back in the broken realities of Africa, often harder to recognize here.  A few collisions have scratched pretty clearly though, providing a brokennes, and reality, that would've been hard to miss.

Yesterday I was able to be with Andy, six months into his recovery program and convinced, “This is the time, because it’s finally me that wants it (recovery), versus God, or someone else, wanting it for me.”  Last weekend I was able to share dinner with a homeless woman named Nancy.  She comes from an educated and lucrative background and spoke of fond memories living on a farm and “breathing the airs of freshness” (I loved that she spoke of air in a plural sense…how did something so robust and uncontainable gain such a confined, singular phraseology?).  And I’m not sure if you remember the story of Barbara (see February posts), but she’s been a special player in bridging my gaps to brokenness, and has ironically resurfaced this week.  Barbara called at midnight on Saturday, ecstatic to apologize for her silence, but more ecstatic to brag that she’d been in a strict rehab program and as of that morning (at 12:01am), had been sober from meth, pot and alcohol for ninety days.  This Friday we will get to share a meal and afternoon of hiking.  If I were gonna die on Saturday, this is exactly how I’d schedule it—truly being with a person and doing so in the unshackled confines of airs.

As I ponder these stories, each seems to pose a bridge.  A bridge to the broken.  A bridge to my brokenness.  A bridge to complexities of the past, concerns for the future and realities of the present.  Each receives me as a bridge to poverty—my poverty and theirs, my wealth and theirs, my story and theirs.  Each presents a bridge to humanity—humanities heart and the heart of humanities longing.

Can it be quantified this simply though?  Life—as a web of bridges—connecting me to you and you to me—or me to me—or me back to them—and all back to Thee?  Could it be—not to fix, or force, or finalize, or face, but to bridge and to be bridged and to be with bridging gaps?

Is this all just a bridge?

I was broken.  And dirty.  And gross.  And you were able to be with me.

I thought it was gone.
I thought we were done with this.
Will you ever leave me fully?  
We you ever leave me in full?

Sometimes this is the conversation that goes with my sin.  Or sometimes it’s what goes with my circumstance.  Today it's my summer.  I can't get rid of it.  Fall is edging toward Winter, and I'm still stuck in a season well past.  

Some call what I'm experiencing "Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome."  I call it…I don’t know what I call it.  Hard.  Exhilerating.  Awful.  Real.  Right. …  It depends on the hour.

Tip-toe'ing on the gates of hell scared me to a point where death and danger are no longer what happens to old people, or hurts only on the movie screen.  Death is real and danger is present.  The question is, am I willing to feel that?  In a culture that’s convenient and “full of life,” am I willing to feel that no matter how it’s spun, it still carries death.  Sometimes at face value, and sometimes as an undercurrent, but at the end of the day, I’m still a dying person.  We’re still a dying people, and we still live on a dying planet.  

So in a world that facades reality and a body that runs from pain, do I have the courage to engage with death’s sentence?  And if so, do I have the courage to engage with the one that claims Life?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaXXdF_tKPM

Granted, I was in Boston last weekend, but it’s something more.  More unrefined, but complex.  Permeating, yet freeing.  It feels like a window.  An escape.  A journey.  A beginning.

I like it.