Mission Year Meals: Super Bowl Sunday

Today is a little bit different from most days because it’s Super Bowl Sunday! You may remember that we don’t have a television in our house. For that reason we went to our pastor’s house to watch the game with his family. So we didn’t have to cook! But we did bring a dip over and some cupcakes over to their house. So here are the recipes we used for Sunday and the meal breakdown.

Cheese Dip

1 block (1 lb.) of Velveeta cheese

1 pound of sausage

1 can of tomatoes with green chilies

1 can of cream of mushroom soup

Brown the sausage. Combine all ingredients in a crock pot and cook it on high for one hour.

The cupcakes we took to the party were sent in a care package! We get care packages fairly often, and this week three of us got packages at one time, so we took the cupcakes to the party to share our fresh-baked bounty. The benefactor of the cupcakes also sent powdered sugar to make frosting for the cupcakes, so I made cream cheese frosting, too. Here’s the recipe:

Cream Cheese Icing

3 cups powdered sugar

1 package cream cheese

1 stick of butter

½ t. vanilla

Combine ingredients and mix until creamy.

Red velvet cupcakes in a football formation!

Here’s the cost breakdown of Sunday’s groceries:

Cream Cheese $1.49

Sausage $2.29

Velveeta Cheese (off-brand “Marvella”) $4.99

Can of tomatoes with green chilies $.63

The other items we already had: cream of mushroom soup, powdered sugar, butter, vanilla

TOTAL: $9.50

Today’s meals demonstrate an important aspect of our lives: other people looking out for us. Our friends love to provide for us, and we always have enough. Sometimes we have abundance! As noted above, we receive a few care packages throughout each month. We also have friends in the city—neighbors, co-workers, church friends—that invite us over to parties, take us out to lunch, or bring us fruit. So thanks to everyone who cares for us. We would get by without you, but it makes it easier to have you helping out!

Mission Year Meals: Saturday

Saturday is the night we host our community dinner. We invite neighbors, friends from church, co-workers, or some combination of those to come to our house and share a meal. It’s out biggest meal of the week, so we sometimes have to get creative about how to make our money go farther. This week, though, we hosted our next-door neighbors, an older couple that look out for us and chat with us on the porch regularly. They were the first people we met in the neighborhood, so we’ve been trying to have them over since then! Finally we had them over to enjoy a meal with us.

On the menu: White Cheese and Chicken Lasagna!

Head Chef: Priscillia.

Sous Chef: Walter Levi

Check out the recipe here!

Actually this week we were a little ahead of the game, buying some of the ingredients last week, including the lasagna noodles, chicken broth, some of the cheese, and spinach.

Here’s the cost break-down:

One block of mozzarella cheese $1.99

Boneless, Skinless Chicken $5.98

Italian Bread $1.99

We have on hand many of the ingredients necessary for the recipe: onions, garlic, flour, milk, and spices.

In addition, our neighbors brought over a salad and dessert to complement our lasagna.

TOTAL: $10.00

Saturday’s meal is the most difficult to keep in budget, but with generosity from our neighbors and a little bit of planning ahead, we enjoyed a tasty meal and delightful conversation about our neighborhood, encountering critters in the city, home remedies for sickness, and Catholic traditions, with plans penciled in to visit mass at our neighbors’ parish.

Mission Year Meals: The Grocery List

Many of my friends were intrigued (or should I say shocked?) that my daily food budget is a little more than $2.00 a day, which totals to $117 for my team for the week. Some of you don’t believe that we actually eat enough to survive. This is the first in a series of posts this week to prove to you that we are not only surviving but thriving with plenty to eat and actually hosting guests for dinner once a week!

Early on we established a system for feeding ourselves that has endured until now. For some context to this conversation, here’s our system:

• Everyone is on their own each day for breakfast and lunch.
• For dinner, we are divided into pairs that plan and cook two meals each week, with everyone taking point on one meal a week.
• Every month we switch pairs and switch nights of the week, so that we cook with different people on different days.
• For example, this month I cook with Sophie on Sundays and Thursdays. If we decide that she will take point on Sundays, then I take point on Thursdays, providing the recipe and leadership in the meal preparation.
• We eat together for dinner whenever we can, which is most days, but we always eat together on Family Dinner night, which right now is Mondays.
• On Saturdays, we host a Community Dinner, inviting neighbors and friends from work or church.
• On Fridays, our Sabbath days, no one cooks.
• The pair that cooked the night before does dishes. On Saturday, the Thursday cooking team does dishes.

Now here are some of our operational systems for buying groceries:

• Each week on Saturday morning we create a grocery list, naming items we need for breakfast, lunch, and for each dinner.
• We allot ten dollars for each dinner, leaving about $50 for lunch and breakfast for the week.
• A group of three or four of us goes shopping and the rest of us stay behind to clean the house.

 

The grocery store we frequent is Save-a-Lot, a discount store that carries few name-brand items and has a somewhat limited selection. It’s about five blocks away (depending on how you count blocks), and we usually walk, although there is a bus that goes straight from our block to the store.

We’ve pretty well mastered the layout of the store, and it doesn’t take long for us to fill our cart with the items we seek. We record the cost of each item as we pick it up, and at the end of our spree we add it up and make sure it’s within our budget of $117. Usually it is, but sometimes we have to make hard decisions about what to put back to stay within the budget. 

For example, this week we didn't buy much meat, but we had a lot of dairy products on our list. When we counted up the costs, we were initially at $121. We talked through what we could put back, and ended up getting blocks of cheese instead of bags of shredded cheese, and traded one pack of sliced American cheese for imitation. We also considered putting back the ground turkey in favor of ground beef, but our cheese compromises saved us enough to stay at $115.

Starting on Saturday, I will post our individual dinner meals, sharing recipes and cost-saving ingredients. Each day’s post will be about what we ate exactly one week earlier, so don’t get confused when I reference a Super Bowl party on Sunday! I hope you enjoy this series—it has been fun so far to make it. And hopefully the doubters will believe that we eat and eat well--with just $117!

Past 50th

Last night I was out late for our weekly gathering of all the Philly Mission Year teams. As usual, I was taking the trolley home, this time from Center City. At one of the stops a group of about 7 young people, who I profiled as college students, boarded the trolley and moved to the back. They were pretty much the only ones talking and were loud enough for everyone to hear.

For most of the time I didn’t pay them much mind. Actually I don’t really remember anything else they talked about except which stop would land them at their college. The University of Sciences is the last in a string of several major schools in West Philadelphia, on the border between the large neighborhoods of University City and Southwest Philly. Their stop was 42^nd street.

Part of their conversation was concern that they would miss the stop and go too far down Woodland Avenue, the road the trolley saunters down. Some of them had wandered down to 50^th Street one time on accident, in search of a party, and they didn’t want to do that again. They loudly proclaimed, “Anything past 50^th is bad. Like really bad.”

Those words hurt.

I live past 50^th. Not only that, I live past 60^th—on 62^nd! As I heard them talk about how incredibly bad my neighborhood was, I wondered what the other trolley passengers thought as they heard these college students talk about where they live, work, have fun, and raise their kids. Those considerations hurt even more.

I get where the students were coming from. I’ve said those things before about other communities. Southwest Philly is a place where “bad” things are readily apparent, especially to eyes that come in looking for them. But after living here for a while, I know about plenty of really good things all around places well past 50^th Street.

I know kids that love to play dictionary games they’ve created so they can learn new words.

I know neighbors that shovel each others’ snow.

I know women who are respected for the ways they look out for everyone on the block.

I know old white couples that love their almost all-black neighborhood, even though all of the other white people left at least a decade ago.

But the college students don’t know those things. They only see bad things that they probably just don’t understand. They certainly didn’t understand how hurtful their words were to me and the other residents of Southwest who were headed home like me.

This doesn’t happen in only my neighborhood. Places (and their inhabitants) all over the world are labeled as “bad.” But those negative labels don’t help to end whatever negative attributes we seem to identify. They only reinforce them. I challenge you to consider your words and your thoughts about such places. And I challenge you to challenge others, too, and maybe as we all recognize the good in the places “past 50^th,” the good will be more readily apparent the next time you visit. 

Diversity in the Church

As you may know, Mission Year gives us a couple of weeks off during the holidays. I'm now in my second week back in Philly since then. With the busy-ness of the season, I didn’t have much time to write, but I’ve found a moment at last to share some of my thoughts about my break.

One element of my break that ties into what I’m learning in Mission Year was the diversity of the Church I was able to enjoy over the past month. I attended four different churches in December, all of different flavors and varieties. I have written before that encountering God through different cultures is a hobby of mine. And by different, I don’t just mean different from my own. I suppose a better way to phrase it would be, “Encountering God through a variety of cultures is a hobby of mine.” Here is some the variety I enjoyed in December:

My church in Philadelphia, which I have written about before, is Grace Christian Fellowship. Of course, I attended there for the first couple of weeks in December before my break began. It is a vibrant, young, growing, black church that honors both traditions of the Church and African American heritage. It is loosely liturgical, but congregants are always responsive and interactive to whoever is leading the service, vocalizing their affirmation of the prayer, exhortation, or testimony. Songs are repetitive and passionate, allowing worshippers to dig deeply into the lyrics they profess with each successive proclamation of them. Congregants consider each other family and refer to each other as such. Hugs and kisses abound.

For the first weekend of my break, I visited a dear friend in New Jersey and attended church with him one Sunday while I was there. He is Japanese, and he attends a Japanese church. The band of the small congregation fills the front of a fairly ornate Lutheran sanctuary that hosts them. They use the space in a way that is less formal than the building itself. The service is reverent and reflective, congregants respectfully quiet and thoughtful unless instructed to participate, for instance through song. The service is conducted fully in Japanese, save the lyrics of a couple of hymns sung in both Japanese and English. After it’s over, there is a snack-lunch where the close-knit community catches up with one another, lingering as long as conversation flows.

By Christmas Eve I was home, and I joined my brother, sister, and brother-in-law at their church in Charleston, a young satellite campus of a mega-church committed to reaching the state of South Carolina. The stage is raised high above the large audience, highlighting the feeling that the congregants gathered for an experience, a divine encounter. Every element of the service is technically excellent and perfectly timed, including vocals, music, multi-media, and concert-style lighting. The sermon is displayed on a large screen, a broadcast of the live speaker in another city. Short videos are sprinkled throughout the service. Those gathered follow directions closely as to how and when they should engage as they are guided through a journey. At the conclusion, they are starkly challenged to consider Jesus as savior. Many do, and leave the auditorium for follow-up conversations.

I was home for one Sunday, and I spent it at my parents’ church, a small country church just outside of Charleston. The casual service matches the simple sanctuary of white cinder blocks where it takes place. Members pop up from seated positions in the audience to fulfill various roles as musicians, vocalists, ushers, and preacher. It’s a team effort to bring worship to God. The music is sometimes played live and sometimes played over speakers, but usually has a country twang, and participants often close their eyes while singing and bouncing back and forth to the song. After the sermon, a few congregants use the open space at the front of the church for prayer alone or in pairs while everyone else sings a hymn.

I take the time to detail my experiences (can you tell I was a religion major?) to demonstrate the diversity of my church involvement in December. I take such joy in observing how different communities interact with God and joining in with them in their own style. My appreciation for difference has grown so deep that I don’t know any more what is a normal way for me to interact with God. And I like it that way.  

I’m grateful for this season of my life, being fully immersed in another culture’s way of encountering God. African American church traditions are rich and hearty, and I have much to learn about God through the way my brothers and sisters encounter Him. I’m grateful, too, for connections to brothers and sisters from many different cultural, denominational, linguistic, regional, etc. backgrounds who are willing to share with me their encounters with God.

I’m grateful for the diversity I was able to enjoy over break. I want my life’s pursuit of God to be defined by such diversity and more. 

Reflections on the Use of Guns

One week ago today there was a shooting on my block, just a few houses down from where I live. I had been home alone for a while that Friday evening, cooking dinner, relaxing, and actually writing a blog post that never made it to the web. I heard shouting out on the street for a while, which isn’t uncommon. The distance to the other side of our one-way street is short, so people often shout from porch to porch. Even the fact that they were angry shouts wasn’t all that uncommon.

But it was disconcerting to me that the shouts persisted for 25 minutes. At one point I glanced out of the large window in our front door just to see who it was. I didn’t recognize anyone except one of our neighbors who was on her porch across the street from me. She has called herself the “unofficial block captain,” so I was put at ease to see her out there, even if she was just observing the same as me.

I went back to blogging, briefly praying for peace to reign on my block and in Southwest Philly. Not long after, three of my teammates came home, excited to share a funny story from their experience on the trolley ride home. They took turns sharing parts of the story, and we were all laughing.

Then came the shots, several of them. It’s hard to know, but between 7 and 12 shots rang out. Our first reaction was to shut off the lights and run upstairs to the back room of house. We alerted the police and the rest of our teammates who were potentially making their way home soon. Rattled, we prayed together and eventually went to sleep with heavy hearts, wondering who may have been affected by the gunfire.

The next day we saw a police car parked outside the house of a neighbor we know well. You may remember the story from one of my newsletters about a woman who couldn’t believe that we would host a dinner just especially for her and her family. It was her house, where she lives with her husband, two sons (one 22 and one in high school), 10ish-year-old daughter, and four-year-old grandson. We were surprised, because for the most part this family keeps to themselves. We were immediately afraid that the bullets, which had shattered the storm door, had injured any of them, but especially one of the young kids that we play with regularly.

We heard about what happened through the eyes of various neighbors. One of our teenage friends told us it was an intra-gang dispute. She knew because she was standing next to the gunman, apparently not older than 23, who told her, “Get down,” before firing the shots. We learned from the father of the house that it was their oldest son who had “gotten into a little trouble,” but that everyone was okay.

The mother attended our Christmas party later that weekend and told us that her oldest son was shot in the arm, but that he was okay. She told us about how the police offered to take her to the hospital, following the ambulance, but instead went to the police station to question her. After she refused to answer any questions, they eventually took her to her son, the gunfire victim, who was handcuffed to the hospital bed while receiving treatment. Although we were saddened and disgusted by the story she had to share, we were relieved to hear that the physical harm was not extreme.

Our team has spent a lot of time processing these events. There are so many facets. What if I had called the police to break up the dispute in the street before it got violent? What if the trolley had dropped off my teammates a little bit later, so that they would have been walking home when it happened? What if the bullets hit some other part of his body? What kind of trauma would this cause our friend who witnessed it? What if the kids had been playing in the living room? How were we to respond in love to our neighbors’ situation?

Our conversations have not answered every question. But they have revealed the power of guns to turn an emotional response or impulse into a life-changing or life-ending event. From my understanding, the young man with the gun wanted to set his friend straight. In a moment of pride, vengeance, and anger, he pulled out a weapon. Frustrated that his point hadn’t yet been made after 20 minutes, he resorted to use of a deadly weapon.

It’s often said that people, not guns, do the killing. As someone who appreciates technicalities, that saying is technically true. There many, many factors that contributed to this complicated situation, but had the young man not been holding a gun, his fit of pride and vengeance probably would not have ended the same way. I don’t write this to make a political statement. (Frankly, I'm annoyed that most readers can't absorb this without politics coming to mind.) I write to lament that such life-threatening power is afforded to emotion and impulse by guns. I never want my emotions—be they anger, pride, envy, fear, or protection—to be so powerful as to take life. I don’t trust myself—or anyone really—to augment raw emotion with the power to kill.

It’s not worth it.

Please join me in praying for my neighbors affected by gun violence last week and those around Philly affected by it almost daily. Pray for the gunman on my street and all those that resort to gun violence. Pray for a society that trusts deadly force to impulse and emotion. Pray for violence of all kind to end.

Litany of Humility

It has been a crazy week--there is a lot going on at work and there's a lot going on in our church and neighborhood. Although there is much that I would love to write about, I offer you this week the words of another. This prayer by Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val (1865-1930) was first introduced to me at the solitude retreat a few weeks ago. I have returned to it often since then because I constantly need to be reminded that I am here as a learner: in my neighborhood, my work site, my church, my home, and even on the street going to and from these various places! I am a learner, not considered higher than anyone else. This prayer frees my on an inclination to try to be anything else. Please pray it for me and with me.

Litany of Humility

O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being loved ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being extolled ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being honored ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being praised ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being preferred to others ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being consulted ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being approved ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being humiliated ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being despised ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of suffering rebukes ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being calumniated ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being forgotten ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being ridiculed ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being wronged ... Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being suspected ... Deliver me, Jesus.
That others may be loved more than I, ... Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I ... Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That, in the opinion of the world, others may increase and I may decrease ... Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be chosen and I set aside ... Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be praised and I unnoticed ... Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be preferred to me in everything ... Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should … Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.