Matthew’s Question to Madison: Why do you want to live in an area of the city that’s often pushed to the side?

My initial response to this question was simple:

“Because it’s just where my heart is.”

How do I explain my heart?

There are many factors, and though I probably can’t explain half of them, part of it can be traced back to my childhood.

I grew up in Guelph, Ontario, and for those first 8 years, I lived the best life. Our family was snug in the middle of a street with four houses lining each side. It was a small street that descended down a hill, bordered by train tracks at the bottom. Beyond that was a forest with a stream winding its way through the lush trees.

Of all eight houses on the street, every home had children living there within five years of my brother and I. We spent a lot of time together. We’d close down our street in the summer to have neighbourhood BBQs, and we’d close down our street in the winter to sled down it. We had a pool and playground in our backyard, and you could find all the kids there in the summer. Our other neighbour had an ice rink during the winter, and we’d all lace up our skates and try not to collide into one another.

But best of all. Every Sunday my parents would whip out the griddle and make dozens and dozens of pancakes. It was Pancake Sunday. All the kids would walk over early in the morning, and we’d all gather around the table and drown our pancakes in syrup. Then everyone would pile into vans and we’d go to church together.

My childhood was the definition of community. We shared so much together. And that’s where I believe my heart for community stems from.

Once we moved to London, I never really experienced the strength and depth of a neighbourhood community like that again.

When I walk into this one neighbourhood though, my heart can sometimes literally flutter because of the community feeling. It doesn’t have any equivalent to Pancake Sunday, or an ice rink to skate on in the winter. It doesn’t have neighbours who always communicate well together or kids who all get along. It’s not littered with wealth (it’s littered with litter), or full of parents who are actively engaged in their kids’ lives.

It’s a place many people would never dare think of entering.

But I LOVE that place.

And it rips my heart to pieces to hear people make negative comments about that place. The people who live there are people I dearly love, and kids I see so much potential in – yet they are often stripped down to nothing because of an outsider’s perspective.

“Well, she’ll be pregnant before 18.”

“He’ll be in jail pretty soon.”

“Oh that school there is a no good place.”

“I would never go there – it’s violent, and I fear I’m going to get murdered.”

My heart breaks just writing those words. And sure, they’re not all word for word things I’ve heard, but it’s the true thought behind other comments.

I’ve spent the last five years of my life investing into this community as an outsider, and I so deeply yearn to be an insider. To live there full time; to have an open door home where it will be full of kids after school; to be able to look out my window to see neighbours sitting on their porch, and go join them; to grow up with the kids as they become youth and the stigma around where they live becomes way more real to them.

Even as an outsider, I still KNOW that community, and I see the potential in my friends and the kids there. I pray for those kids often, begging God to do a good work in their lives despite their circumstances – and to allow me to have a front row seat in the action.

Why those kids, in particular, have captured my heart? I can only give credit to the Holy Spirit. The depth of my love for that community is real and raw – it hurts. I’ve never been in love, but if this is what love feels like, wow!

But I also feel the love of God in a way I experience nowhere else.

I once had a vision of a cloud shadowing over the neighbourhood. But then the cloud parted and a stream of light broke through. The light got bigger, illuminating everything below it.

I then had this gut feeling,

“God’s going to do something wild here!”

When you see and hear God somewhere, there’s no place you’d rather be. It’s captivating. It’s inspiring. It’s life transforming.

It’s something so hard to explain – it just is. It’s just an inner desire, an inner urgency, to do life more closely with them. And though moving there is not my immediate next step, it doesn’t downplay the fact that I desperately want to be present all the time – to be closer to them, and to be closer to God (not because God is more present there, but because that’s where His heart is for my heart to be).

Madison’s Question to Matthew: What are you thinking with respect to a Christian’s response to issues of justice?

When Madison speaks of justice, I know that the first verse that comes to her mind is Micah 6:8 “No, O people, the Lord has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” She has a shirt with this on, as well as a sticker on her laptop. For me, as her father, it is encouraging that she has embraced what is so clearly outlined in scripture at an early age.

This was not the case for me. In fact, up until age 38, it was only an afterthought at best. If I did think about it, is was to excuse myself from not doing anything about it because it was inconvenient, or to think that those experiencing injustice perhaps deserved what they got. I was ignorant.

When I was 38, I was in a men’s group and one of the scriptures we memorized as part of our study was Isaiah 58:6-7 “No, this is the kind of fasting I want: Free those who are wrongly imprisoned; lighten the burden of those who work for you. Let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people. Share your food with the hungry, and give shelter to the homeless. Give clothes to those who need them, and do not hide from relatives who need your help.”

For some reason, the verses dug in. I was moved to engage the topic of injustice and confess my ignorance and lack of action. But what to do? I began by engaging in conversations with leaders of non-profit organizations in our city. Asking them questions about what they did and why they did it? What were the issues that they were trying to address? I started volunteering in a few places – serving breakfast at a drop-in centre, joining the board of a non-profit apartment building with 22 units, repairing bikes to donate to those that couldn’t afford one.

All of these activities along with a new lens with which to read the bible began to change my mindset. I started to see that the next step for someone who was homeless wasn’t to simply tell them to get a job, it wasn’t even to find them a place to stay even if it was at a reduced rent that they could afford on government assistance. There were so many layers to their lives that included relationship breakdowns, abuse, mental health issues, family dysfunction, etc. It was very messy.

There was injustice due to deep sin, including trafficking girls and kids for sexual gratification in my city and around the world. There was injustice around nationality and culture which I was completely immune to because I am a white male and in my culture, I am never discriminated against.

And then I began to see injustice at different levels of society. Sports leagues and their societal demands. The NBA will bring in $8.5 billion in revenue in 2018 yet they, and other sports leagues, demand that cities and states/provinces pay for new arenas and stadiums even though the leagues have the money to pay for them – they just choose to keep it for themselves.

Injustice takes place in day to day conversations as we judge schools in our city based on information passed down over years that can’t even be validated. How many people do whatever they can to live in a different part of town so that their kids can avoid a certain school? Are the judgments of these areas of the city and their school an injustice? And in actuality, what should the response of Christians be? I can speak from experience in the school conversation. When we moved to London we were not aware of these discrepancies until we moved into an area that apparently didn’t have a good elementary school or high school. Yet here we were, the location of our house determined which school our kids would attend. And, our kids had an amazing experience. I joined the parent school council at each school to keep me aware of what was going on and to have some influence. The more we heard people talk about our kids’ schools and how bad they were supposed to be, and the more we, as a family, experienced these schools, I got more and more irritated. This was an injustice. People declaring things without truly getting into the middle of it.

We all like stories of people who choose to enter into the messiness of injustice. We cheer them on, we might even send some money their way. But for us to embrace injustice, to speak out when those we are with choose to speak unjustly, this is quite another thing altogether.

And yet, if you read the bible in its entirety, if you engage with all of its content, then you can’t avoid the fact that God calls his people to act justly. To enter into messy moments, messy relationships, embrace everyone no matter their circumstances. To speak out on behalf of those who can’t speak out for themselves. And to enter into situations to rescue those who need rescuing.

So what am I thinking about with respect to our call to be people of justice? All I can say is that I am on a continual path of learning and engaging. I am certain that there are significant gaps in my thinking and my acting – I don’t know what I don’t know.

I also know that the world will experience justice, not primarily in government laws and decisions handed out by courts (this is merely external compliance), but when each individual chooses to embrace acts of justice. When our hearts are truly moved to beat as God’s heart beats which will cause us to be people of justice. To speak about and act justly, as God requires of us.

For the kingdom.