Experimenting with Infused Water on our Porch

Questions that we bat around on the front porch: What is ours to do in making the world a better place? How do we offer a safe place and invite people into conversations? Are we telling our stories and listening to others as they also have stories to tell? What if the other person's story makes us want to run away and hide? What kind of person would I need to be in order to make sitting with people and deeply listening to them possible? Is it possible and desirable to become such a person?

Heather has been my neighbor next door for a while now. We do not really hang out on the porch much....until recently. She is a generous and gracious person and noticing that I got super excited about infusing water earlier this summer offered her old mason jar to me for my new hobby. As we were talking one day, it suddenly emerged this idea of offering infused water for our community.

Every day, I slice stuff and put it along with ice and water in the jug and set it out on the front porch. Just in the last few weeks, there has been a lot of good conversation and stories around the water on the porch. I decided to add a conversation starter/trivia/scripture/practice for the day there in case people wanted another kind of infusion along with the water.

Here is a sample: (starting with the concept of hospitality for obvious reasons) Orange-Pineapple - conversation starter: recall and share a story of a time when someone showed you extraordinary hospitality. Cantaloupe and cucumber - exercise: today listen twice as much as you speak. Reflect on this exercise. Was it easy or hard? Did you learn anything about yourself? Share these insights with someone and notice if they listen.

This Dream, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The pressure behind my eyes was fierce. Tears had been flowing for a long time. It felt like all day, but maybe it was just a half hour or so. I couldn't convince my tear ducts to quit, but the headache was on the verge of unbearable.

I was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. As part of my required reading for book club, ironically, since my dissertation reading has ceased, I have read more than a few frivolous books such as this one dealing with the evils of racism. He recounts from his perspective racism in this county. It is his personal account written as a letter to his 15 year old son. It depicts how black bodies have been, in the history of our country, enslaved, locked up, raped, and murdered. He tells how he has witnessed the lack of responsibility taken and lack of real justice done in his lifetime, with his family, and friends. He speaks of the Dream that we have of our country being a place of justice and freedom and how all of us will go to great lengths to preserve the dream even when we suspect that it really is a lie.

He acknowledges the temptation to turn away, to run and hide, to try to debunk these realities as anomalies. If we are tempted to look away and dismiss these realities, we are at a place of transformation. Listening to the news stories from riots in Baltimore and Furgeson, MO can be difficult and the high profile cases of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin is difficult. But, if you (and I) are white and if you say you follow Jesus, this is not your time to run away and hide. This is your time to listen. It is our time to pull up a chair and listen. What if we listened without making excuses or becoming defensive or dismissing it as "their fault?"

Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates' story was torture for me, but I did it and I'm glad I did. I'm glad I did because it reminds me that I have so much to learn. I have a lot to learn from African Americans and I'm intending for them to increasingly become my teachers. They are under no obligation to become my teachers....they do not owe me anything. It is the other way around. I owe them a love that begins by listening. We all, as Coates suggests, have a capacity to become haters. We must face our own capacity to plunder and to separate ourselves from those who are not like us. Hate gives identity. (page 60) I'm surrendering my Dream and I am laying my own capacity to run, distance, plunder, and hate firmly in the loving arms of Jesus. I'm convinced that if anyone can re-order my heart, my community, and this world, it is him and his love.