Philip's Tunnel to Nowhere 3

I’ve sort of a bizarre follow-up to our last installment about blighted buildings. Last week I happened to be checking out Memphis’ newest music venue, walking in from the parking lot. I didn’t really notice the demolition site across the street until the sudden din caused by a 15 meter square chunk from the corner of an eight-story building tumbling to the ground! And then it dawned on me that this was one of the buildings I happened to be praying for, the one on Madison and Willett.

I’m not going so far as to say that the demolition was a direct answer to prayer — I’m sure it was scheduled for months — but I’m quite sure that God arranged that little coincidence of me being there at that time to remind me that those prayers matter. If you’ve never seen part of a large building destroyed across the street, I highly recommend it. I have no idea what they’re going to do with the site. For all I know, it could be part of the same project as the music venue. In any case, I now feel even more invested for praying that the owners/developers would consider whatever project will have the most positive effect on Midtown and on Memphis as a whole.

Lately as I’ve wandered around Memphis, I’ve been thinking a lot about certain visible signs of decay that are present in cities. Although broken windows theory has its limitations, it certainly seems hard to dispute that hulking unused buildings leave an impression of a city in disrepair.

I’ve decided to make a commitment to pray for the following rather large buildings that I’ve noticed around Memphis:

• The Hotel Chisca at 272 South Main (see here and scroll to the bottom; this pdf isn’t working for me)
• A blockish building on Madison and Pauline that may be part of what Baptist Hospital left in its wake when it left the area.
• Another blockish building farther down Madison, somewhere between McNeil and Belvedere, which is apparently for lease but still looks awfully underutilized.
• The immense Sears building at 495 N. Watkins – when I was in Methodist Hospital, my 7th floor room in University Tower had a great view of this building.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend suggested that I make a concrete effort to put into writing some of the past aspirations that I’ve had, in particular those involving faith-based outreach. I think the idea is a good one, and it’s just a matter of making time and giving myself permission to write down stuff that may seem incomplete or even not that interesting any longer. It’s a leap of a faith, albeit a small one, because I’m trying to believe that God has given me this little snippets of experience and little dreams and aspirations for some valid reason and that writing them down will prove beneficial.

First some background: from 2000 to the end of 2004 I had gone from praying that God would somehow enlighten me about how to do outreach to the people in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA; to discovering that there were already people in a nearby Vineyard church doing outreach by buying pizzas, hanging out, and talking with folks under the name of Harvard Square Outreach (H2O); to getting involved in H2O and eventually co-leading it. In early 2005 I had a profoundly negative experience in ministry in a different place. I had planned to move back to Boston in June but daunted by the high cost of living there, never ended up making it back. So I was never again involved in H2O, and as far as I know it sort of fell apart we sort of drifted our separate ways* from that point.

But I’d like to think back to 2003 or 2004, when it seemed like we’d at least established a certain comfort level with doing the weekly pizza outreach and my brain was doing its thing of trying to innovate the next great innovation, and document some of our aspirations about the future of H2O from that point. For one thing, we talked about the need for “a place”, some building or storefront or something where we could potentially hold musical and other events and provide a sort of safe hangout for the same people we were already buying pizza for. We had also discussed using our “place” as some sort of accomodation for homeless young people, but this idea was sort of undercut by the legal implications of working with runaway kids. In short, it was my understanding from other volunteer stints with secular organizations that Mass. law didn’t provide for any sort of housing-related services to runaway minors. Giving them a place to stay could constitute kidnapping!

Nevertheless, we talked and prayed about some sort of place to call our own. I had volunteered for a secular homeless youth drop-in center near Harvard Square called Youth on Fire, and that experience helped shape my vision for the sort of project we could build if we had the resources. Of course high rents make any consideration of finding space in metro Boston seem like something that can only be accomplished by divine intervention! Meanwhile, I also wanted to visit other similar projects that were working in other cities. One such trip was a bittersweet one involving my then-girlfriend Casey, a friend in NH named Gessica, and me to Portland, ME, to visit a project called The Well. I think I had met the organizers at Cornerstone (2003?) or some such, and I can’t recall if they were opening weekly or monthly or how often. At any rate, they weren’t able to continue renting their space, so the occasion when we visited was their last night. That’s too bad, because their “place” appeared to really fill a need for the alternative young people of that city.

Eventually this desire to learn from other places led to my cross-country trip of Oct. – Nov. 2004, and to my ill-fated time in early 2005. I suppose it’s a little ironic that my desire to learn from others sowed the seed of my disillusionment and lack of desire to do anything related to “ministry,” although more than anything it reflects my general lack of tenacity that’s cut short any efforts to discover God’s will for my life. Perhaps documenting past false-starts will help me become more faithful in the future.

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*EDITED because the first draft sounded like I was trying to make myself sound indispensible, which was not my intent. As I recall we were all getting pretty busy with other stuff throughout 2004 anyway, and my geographical move just sort of sealed the deal as far as my own involvement. There may have been other outreach activity under the H2O name from 2005 onward that I just wasn’t aware of.

‘Cos you know, it’s all about the conformity with me.

When this gets sucked into Facebook, I think I’ll tag random people that I don’t really know just for sheer side-splitting fun.

1. When I was in high school, I almost hit a kid trying to cross Memorial Parkway in Huntsville on his bike. I managed to stop just in time to not hurt him, but his bike got banged up pretty good.
2. The Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) showed my strongest tendency as N, “neurotic”. No, just kidding, N is for intuitive, which means I’m always finding patterns to make sense of details and I tend to make decisions based on the big picture.
3. I really like Memphis because it combines a clear hipster element and some exciting cultural opportunities with the gritty blighted authenticity of other places like, say, Detroit and Buffalo. I tend to distrust places that are “too perfect”.
4. Sometimes I wonder if people think I’m gay and closeted because I’m 35, single, and don’t have a procession of different girlfriends, one each week. I’m very much heterosexual, and arguably too picky.
5. I’m a hopeless geek about anything related to geography, and I often use a road atlas as toilet reading.
6. My family spent the summer I turned nine in Southern California. I came away quite impressed by all the freeways.
7. Its failure to adopt the metric system typifies most of what I dislike about my country.
8. I envy those who dress and present themselves in a countercultural or subcultural manner, mostly because I’m too insecure to do the same.
9. I avoid confrontation about disputes that don’t relate to my core beliefs, but I can be very confrontational when my sense of fairness is violated.
10. At some point in my childhood, we were visiting family in Memphis and I was bored out of my skull. So I walked from one set of grandparents’ in Frayser to the other set’s in Cooper-Young, which Google Maps tells me was 12.8 km.
11. My nonconformist streak made it really difficult to give in and make this list, but now that the public clamor has grown too loud to ignore, I’m sort of enjoying it.
12. In theory I’m libertarian but the present economic crisis has pretty much convinced me that society isn’t ready to deal with the consequences of its own actions, and that there’s no way to insulate me from the consequences of others’.
13. I’m on a downswing of embarrassing magnitude in live poker games, which has convinced me to spend more time playing online. Online I can play many more hands in a given period of time, which makes the long run arrive faster. I’m pretty sure I can beat the live games long-term, but I still require thepositive reinforcement of seeing recent results on the bottom line.
14. I intentionally cultivate diverse musical taste, but I’m reluctant to share strong opinions about music with someone unless I already know something about their taste.
15. I suck at chess, even though it fascinates me.
16. I tend to follow spectator sports as a guilty pleasure, because in reality I don’t think their benefit to society is enough to justify the outrageous amount of money, let alone people’s time, that they command.
17. Career issues are a big mystery to me.
18. I spend way too much time thinking about stuff like why signs for I-57 in Chicago list Memphis as the next destination, but other states like Pennsylvania and Mississippi are allowed to list little hamlets like Clarion and Grenada, respectively.
19. My family life during childhood was more tumultuous than most of my acquaintances are aware, but by God’s grace I think I’ve managed to forgive, mostly.
20. When I took a classic slapdash 8-day Eurail tour in 1992, Praha (Prague) impressed me as one of my favorite European cities.
21. I find a woman wearing a black leather biker jacket incredibly sexy.
22. The MBTI shows me as only slightly introverted. I used to be pathetically introverted. I think I successfully taught myself to appreciate other people, but I’m sure you could make a case that the interest was there all along.
23. I really like the classic Memphis street sign design — the one with only the main name of the street in big block letters with no embellishment, like this one, except the older ones have wider letters and sharper angles — even though it’s probably more practical to put the block number and other info on there too.
24. I volunteered (for one day) for Barack Obama’s campaign but I voted for Bob Barr; this was a very rational decision.
25. I have a huge tendency to start new projects but run out of enthusiasm to finish them, which is apparently typical for INFPs. “God, help me to finish everything I sta…”