Ash Wednesday at the Jesus House

I didn't get ashes smeared across my face this year. At first, I was kinda bummed about missing an official Ash Wednesday service.

For the past several weeks, I've been leading a Wednesday night class at a local rescue mission. While it's been a rich experience, the class hasn't been well attended. Tonight, nobody showed except one of the men I picked up who used to live at the mission.

We decided to trundle over to the Jesus House to see a mutual friend of ours who got kicked out of the mission because he twisted off his check (i.e. blew his whole check on drugs).

When we arrived at the Jesus House, we saw a lot of people crammed into a small room. They were having an AA meeting. The windows were open and the fan blowing. It was the perfect ventilation for all the cigarette smoke rising into the air.

We went in and found our seats. I listened intently to the addicts as they talked out their struggles in doing life with addiction. I was especially touched by one young woman. I don't know if she had always been mentally ill or if she had just been badly damaged by druggin', prostitutin', gettin' beat up, bein' raped. But God she was precious.

She shared how her "boyfriend" had stolen her bank card. The first of every month, several hundred dollars in government aid comes in. The boyfriend pays their $250 rent, and the rest of it is gone...poof. Then she has to sell her body to make up for it. Wow.

The people at the Jesus House were red and yellow black and white. They were jovial, happy, and so incredibly positive and supportive of one another. And they smoked like chimneys; ashes were everywhere.

It was indeed Ash Wednesday at the Jesus House.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Several different lines from Leonard Sweet's Out of the Question...Into the Mystery hit me right between the eyes:

To transform the world, you have to enter it and engage.

To this, my idealistic self says, "Oh, yeah!" And my realistic self says, "Oh, shit." So, all I have to do is enter in and engage, eh? Do you know how incredibly overwhelmingly big this world is. And transform it!?! What in the heck does this look like? How does anyone do it!?!

Absence of beauty is a sign of absence of Spirit.

That's just great. I'm a bare, white walls kind of guy. Get some Spirit--hire a decorator.

So, welcome to the curmudgeonly side of the Contemplative Okie.