I am Samkelo and I can read!

Yes - it's time to celebrate!!!
What a great day!!

We talked a few weeks ago about my friend, Samkelo.
He's just about the bestest kid ever - 12 years old and new to Kingsway school, Samkelo and I get to hang out two times every week to play around with letters and words and sounds. He's a lot like me and always wants to pick a spot in the sunshine - even though it's winter here and around 40 degrees in the mornings. I usually bring hot tea for us to share - but Samkelo only likes it when I make tea sweet with sugar.

While Billy is in the states, he is collecting early reading books from a few of our dear friends, and another has provided us with some JumpStart computer games to work from, and another gave us a huge Amazon gift card that I bought a lot of teacher resources with - and a few reading books as well. It's just amazing when you think about it, that Samkelo's journey into being a reader - a journey that will absolutely shape his life - is being joined by us all. It's just like the best things in life - different ones of us sharing what we have to make the world a better place. All the little bits add up to a GREAT BIG WONDERFUL world.

It's true. And thank you.

One more thing I'd LOVE to have for Samkelo is the PBS series, Between the Lions.
If you have some old copies you can share - or even wanted to set your DVR to record and then send us burned DVDs every few weeks, it would be a treat! I've been scouring the internet and a full season is hard to come by.

Our last story letter was about the value of reading-

*(if you don't get our monthy-ish story letters in your email box, we'd love to include you, just let us know!)

one of the things I that struck me in the book "Shaped by the Story" was a unique validation of raising a generation of readers - especially readers that come out of violent, impoverished backgrounds -

"the process of developing internal images and meaning in response to words in the basis of imagination... The capacity for imagination ha profound implications, not just for academic learning, but for behavior as well. Several recent studies have shown that children who lack imagination are far more prone to violence. Such children can not imagine alternatives to their immediate perceptions of anger or hostility; they're able to react only to what they believe is the situation in front of them. On the other hand, children who posses imagination have a very different experience. they can be exposed to the same hostile situation as an aggressive child, but with their ability to imagine, different solutions can be reached."

I think of the recent strikes (rioting and violence) that have plagued our community. I think of the abuse and neglect. I think of the lack of forward vision or cause-and-effect understanding. I think of the lack of trust toward outsiders and insiders alike. I think of the vast number of uninformed people, both inside and outside of our community, and all around the world. Not uninformed because of a lack of media information, but uninformed because a bigger world view hasn't had the opportunity to influence their experiences and offer alternatives. We live this life all the time when we believe in stereotypes, when we fail to see the individual humanity that weaves through other cultures, when we simply fail to look outside our own worlds into the big one God created.

Eugene Peterson in "Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places" says

"Story is the most natural way of enlarging and deepening our sense of reality, and then enlisting us as participant in it. Stories open doors to areas or aspects of life that we didn't know were there, or had quit noticing out of over-familiarity, or supposed were out of bounds to us. They then welcome us in. Stories are verbal acts of hospitality."

Our ministry here is relational. It's journey-ing life together. It's storytelling and story-living and pouring ourselves out over and over again in an invitation for the people around us to participate in a deepening sense of reality. We pray to live our lives as God's acts of hospitality.

Matthew 5

"You're here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. ........

—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you'll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven. "