Two big milestones yesterday: Joy's formal legal adoption and the party to celebrate it (see "reviews" for photos soon), AND we moved to the next big stage of construction: framing!

Don't get me wrong, we're not finished with either the masonry or the steel, but we need a second floor surface to stand on before we can make more progress on those fronts.

Before anything can be built inside these block walls, they need to be painted. Not any old white paint;a moisture sealant to keep mold at bay and let the porous block breathe only to the outside. It will protect the interior woodframe from all sorts of problems.

Armando and Joy, playing in the opening for our front door. Those block walls are as high as they can get without the inner structure of the house to support them. Plus, since there is no room for scaffolding on the outside of the house, we'll build the 2nd floor for Lugo and his crew to stand on to do the second level of block.

Then the lumber arrived this morning. Lots of lumber.

By the afternoon, the framers had most of that first pile of lumber already put in, or at least laid out where needed...

...just in time for this next set of lumber to arrive (more neatly packaged).

Wow, it has been years since so many people have asked me/talked about New Years resolutions. Nothing new for me this year, just the one resolution that I have made over and over a thousand times in the past ten years or so:

"Resolved: to live with all my might, while I yet live."
--- Jonathan Edwards

New site music: "007", of the album D’Arranged, by Phil "Harmonic” Epstein.

Building this house is dangerous, risky, like a James Bond adventure, confronting a vast polylithic bureaucracy that is unconsciously conspiring to prevent new construction in South Central Los Angeles... not to mention building the relational network that will make this house a home, among challenges like our "young friend" mentioned several times in the last month. Unlike Bond, we are trying to pull the teeth of the “bad guys” and work with them, befriend them. We have a license to love, not to kill, a mandate to give our lives in obedience to God, not to take lives in obedience to M.

So this cover of the 007 theme song seems appropriate: acoustic guitar and bass played by one lone artist. Like the song, we do not come with full orchestral backing and special effects: we are not doing this as part of an international well-funded ministry, or a government-backed redevelopment initiative. We’re doing it on our own, inviting friends and sympathizers to join us.

But all the thrill and intrigue is still there. We are organizing a “fifth column” of God-lovers on this little block in FruitTown territory. Ours is a gentle revolution, a breath of Spirit into stuffy oikoses, a trickle of living water across the pavement and tar paper of West Adams, seeking thirsty cracks to fill.

Are you a thirsty crack? I am. Let’s be honest about ourselves and use humble metaphors. We’re "not all that”, as an old neighbor used to say. We’re only human. Cracked, flawed, not entirely right with the world. Some of us know what it’s like to be paved over and trodden upon. Even the hardest surfaces crack, given time, but not all feel the thirst within.

Let's hope for thirst in 2006.

Thanks to all who came to our New Year's party! It was great fun. JP Travis and John Chang, you guys win the "first to cross the porch" award; thanks for helping us prepare before everyone else arrived.

It was great to see so many people from different walks of life find common ground and hit it off so well. Several times I wandered about looking for someone who looked left out or disgruntled or disconnected, and I never did! Thanks to those of you who were good sports about my hot chocolate experimentation. Kim Grammer, I made myself a mint/dark chocolate like the one I made for you, and the peppermint was so strong it cleaned out my sinuses nicely. So either you have conditioned yourself to have a high tolerance for peppermint extract, or you are extremely gracious to this well-meaning cocoarista. (cocoa+barista... what else do you call someone who mixes up custom hot chocolate creations?) Next time I'll have the extracts at half-strength and more easily and exactly decanted.

The highlight of the evening was hearing everyone's highlights of 2005 and hopes for 2006. May it all come to pass. Grace and strength to each of you, and thank you for your honesty, especially when it was difficult to put words to the complexities of life.

One of many sad consequences to choosing gang life is that you spend less time in school, and less attention when you're there. The "Thug Life" boasts a glamor of sorts, but it scorns most of the basic disciplines one needs in life, in order to be taken seriously by anyone besides teen fans and the police. Like spelling.

Being a writing tutor, and having been an editor in the past, perhaps I pay too much attention to spelling and grammar and such. But when you can't spell the name of your own gang (in this case, "HARPYS"), I'm sorry, that's pathetic.

("D.E. 13" is short for "Dead End 13th St.", or The Dead End Gang, which was subsumed by the larger Harpys later on, or morphed into the Harpys, or something. The D.E. was accidentally begun by an urban missionary, in fact, in the early 1970s... but that's a different story)

I had a lot of help painting over it!

An update on the saga of the Stolen Laptop:
(click back to December 11 for the beginning)

Our young friend returned a week after the theft. He rang the doorbell, wanting to speak to me. I had been carrying my camera around in my pocket, expecting to see him somewhere, hoping to snap a photo of him so Julio could positively ID him... or maybe clear him of suspicion. I sat down with him on the front porch and listened. According to my notes soon after he left, it went something like this (these threads were more tangled in the actual conversation, but it's more readable this way):

"I want to talk with you, pastor [I am not a pastor]. I heard something, a laptop computer, went missing from your house. There have been some bad rumors going around about me. I just want you to know, I know who did it. He's a short paisano maybe named, uh, Jose or something. I'm not sure. He sold it to a drug dealer. Maybe I can get it back."

I said, "I'm glad you came. We've been looking for you. My next-door neighbor saw the guy who took the laptop, and even followed him a little. He thinks it's you. I want to take your photo so I can prove to him the guy he saw wasn't you."

I pull the camera out of my pocket; he tugs his hoodie drawstrings so all I can see is his nose and upper lip.

He says, "No, I don't like photos. I'll tell you later, why. ...Yeah he [Julio] didn't understand, I saw the guy but it wasn't me..."

The tense-pretending-to-be-casual verbal probing and parrying carried on a little more, but it ended with me leaning on the gate, camera in hand, saying "You're walking away from my best shot at clearing you." He grumbled back, over his shoulder, "You think I'm guilty."

Both of us spoke the truth. Only one of us wished we were wrong.

The following Monday I spotted him on 20th Street, and our eyes met as I drove by. I would have stopped if others weren't depending on me. He called out something as I passed; in the mirror I saw him raise both hands quick in the air... a salute? a challenge? a curse? a cry for help? Minutes later I was able to drive back that way again. No trace of him.

The next day Nathaniel had a lot of old school buddies over for a Christmas party. Amid the happy chaos, the doorbell rings: it's him again. This time Kathryn starts dialing immediately as I sit again with him on the porch. He has chutzpah: he's asking me for money, a sizable amount. And he has come to terms with his photo-phobia: he'll let me take his picture for $10 (which is less than he says he "needs"). Desperation and condescension vy for supremacy in his attitude. This is very strange but somehow befits the occasion and the person. Just as he has trouble sticking to one story, he has trouble sticking to one emotion. He is a shattered soul. Knowing what shattered feels like, I feel for him-- but now a police car rolls slowly past, staring at us.

I keep him talking, though we're now at the front gate. The police back up. To make a long story short, they detain him in handcuffs while I trot off to find Julio and a dozen children press wide eyes against the windows, watching from within.

I learn his real name. And his age: just 21, five years younger than I guessed. He gives an address too but I can't hear it. Not sure I believe it either, as he does not smell well-housed. I learn that he is on probation, not on parole; that he has a crack habit (the broken glass stem of a crack pipe was at the bottom of his cigarette pack); and that he has a bench warrant for a traffic violation-- on a bicycle. (at least his ride of choice is environmentally responsible, I find myself thinking) The cops take him to the station to ID him and then release him, since Julio is not home and there is not enough evidence to press any charges against him. They say they will give me a business card with the incident number so I can follow up, but they don't.

Instead, HE returns just an hour later. No sign of anger: the fake coolness and chumminess is back. As if to reassure me everything will be all right, he promises he will be back soon with my laptop. He'll just go beat up the guy who has it and bring it right over. Clear all this right up.

It has been almost a week, and we haven't seen him anywhere. I have a Christmas gift for him if he ever returns: Erwin's gift, Vox Dei. It's the only answer I have to the question I posed on December 11: "how do you teach [motivate, inspire, prod, move, redirect, awaken, thrill, frighten, convince, etc.] a person to build, and not destroy, their oikos and hence their life?"

Still hoping for more advice on that.

There is a joke told in Russia about a farmer who, while plowing his field, discovers a magic lamp buried in the soil. He rubs it and a genie appears. The genie offers him one wish, anything he wants, but there is a catch: whatever wealth, riches, or good fortune this man receives, his neighbor will receive twice as much. After some thought, the farmer straightens up with a smile and says, "Make me blind in one eye."

The Week had a blurb a while back* about "the rich keep getting richer": that's not a problem unless the rich are evil. Nina Munk complains "The same people appear year after year after year [on the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest US citizens]: Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Paul Allen... Members of the Forbes 400... are richer than Croesus, and every hour they are getting richer."

This sort of diatribe frustrates me, because it presumes that envy is a legitimate ground for moral reasoning. The actual moral question in view here is not "are the rich getting richer" (and by implication, you and I are not: press ENVY button here), but "are the rich using their wealth to care for the poor?"

I wonder if anyone has researched the Forbes 400, particularly the "persistently rich" perennial names on that list, to find an answer to that question. To take the very first person Munk mentions, I must say that the way Bill Gates has chosen to wield his wealth has completely changed my personal opinion of him (as a Mac addict myself, it wasn't good). I may not agree with all the things his foundation decides to fund, but he's certainly no Scrooge. In his response to TIME Magazine naming him (and Bono) as "2005 Persons of the Year", Bill says "We realize that we've been extremely fortunate in business, and we want to give back in ways that can do the most good for the most people." He's no poet, but he isn't lying either. He has given away hundreds of millions of dollars, and tried to do it in the wisest way he knows how, not merely as a tax shelter. In fact, he and his wife Melinda aim to give away most of their fortune during their lifetimes (sorry I can't find the source for that, to quote it).

A great many other rich people feel the same as Bill: they recognize that they have been blessed beyond what they have a right to expect from life (whether by God or "fortune" or whatever), and they want to "give back" to help those who are hurting or struggling.

Naturally, a great many rich people like to think they feel the same as Bill but are in fact guilty of neglecting the poor and even actively oppressing them. Some rich people do not even pretend to share Bill's sentiments. That is moral failure worth calling attention to: not accumulation of wealth but evil use of it, in omission or comission. But as we do so, let's not fall into envy's trap and wish poverty on the rich. Let's wish prosperity for the poor.

Another reason diatribes like Munk's frustrate me is the way they tend to muddy this other legitimate issue, which is not a moral problem but a macroeconomic problem: the stalling of upward financial mobility. The not-yet-rich are not joining the ranks of the rich as frequently as they once did, in America. The poor are not rising so often to the middle class. The indigent homeless are not rising so often to the ranks of the working poor. Or are they? What's stopping them? Why? I don't know.** Too much ink is spilled about the straw man of class envy, so articles rarely get around to the real problems underneath the hot-button topics.

It tempts me to research it myself and write my own articles about it.

*21 October 2005, condensed from Nina Munk's article in the New York Times.
**Although I have some ideas, as do you. What's your opinion?

A family discussion about Christmas which actually occurred around the beginning of this Christmas season. Kathryn wrote it all down verbatim right after it happened, as soon as she could see through her tears of laughter:

Kathryn: Do you know whose birthday we celebrate on Christmas?
Joy: Mine!
Nathaniel: No, it's someone in the Bible.
J: Joy! I have a new Bible!
K: It's someone who knows everyone in the world and loves them all.
J: Sammy! [Sam Voss, son of Hank and Johanna, a sweet kid whom Joy sees twice a week]
N: It's JESUS' birthday!
J: But I can't see Jesus!
N: Do you know where Jesus is?
J: He's not here.
N: He's everywhere!
J: Not in this house. Maybe he's over there [pointing next door].
K: At Michael's house?
J: Yeah, he went in that way.
N: Jesus is in heaven right now. Do you know which way heaven is?
J: NORTH!

I guess in some ways, we're all still learning our way around this big unpredictable universe. Like Joy, may we find the grace to pursue God, in all our honest bumbling, in the company of friends... especially if they know which way heaven is.

Overheard just now at the Nelsons' lunch table:
Kathryn [reading statistics aloud from The Week]: "It says here that two out of three American kids have TVs in their bedrooms."
Armando: "TVs? What are those?"

yessssss. A parental victory. I kept my mouth shut and trotted right up here to share my joy with you.

For the record, all my children do know what televisions are. We see them in restaurants, shopping malls, theme parks, sports bars, clothing stores, and other people's homes. I have explained to them how a TV works. None of them are very interested in having one, though.

What's the point, when they have a computer with a DVD player and broadband internet access?

(but, not in their bedroom...)

woohooo, passed block inspection: the fellow liked it so much he said we didn't need to call for the next one, just when we have rough framing done. Yaay, Bob and Lugo!

But we want all stamps in order, so we'll do it anyway.

Photos pending.