I Don't Want to be a Bad Storyteller Part 3: Our Story

    I could tell you that I wanted so long to post this 3rd part to build up your anticipation, but I'd be lying. It's been a busy time for me lately and will get even busier soon. So without further ado I left the last post hanging with a question, what's my story? The better question is what's my story in relation to my context here at Impact? How are our stories interacting with each?
   Impact has been around a little longer than I've been alive and now I feel like it is on the cusp or at the climax you could say of its story. For a long time Impact has been really good at reaching the poor and marginalized of the community, but now our neighborhood has changed and will continue to change. Slowly over the last 10 years town homes that sell for over $250,000 have popped up all through the neighborhood. In these homes live young professional types who want to live closer to downtown rather than driving in for work. Eventually, all of this neighborhood will consist of this population.

   This group of people is not one that Impact has had a lot of success in reaching in the past, and to some people of Impact they are fine with not reaching these people. I am not. I think that Impact should be a church for all people, no matter their situation; rich, poor, black, white, latino, homeless, young, old, everyone should be a part of this community.
  There's been a lot of dreaming lately about how to reach this demographic of our community. Lots of ideas have been thrown around, and I want to share one of mine. A garden. You would be surprised how many people are into gardening in Houston, the big thing is community gardening. So with my high school kids we have been looking at places and ways to do this. And the beautiful part is that we want to do it with things from the communities we live in and bring in the thrown away toilets and tires and put soil in them and let them be a part of creating life. To me that's such a redemptive and restorative image.

  Most importantly, I need to take hold of being a person who seeks to reach this group, because I am in that age bracket, I understand them better than most of the staff here I hope. So I'm writing a part of my story here, and I have to take hold of it. And that's scary sometimes. This garden may fail. But I will not fail. Because I am going to continue to serve a God that never fails. And that may mean writing the story in a different way, and I'm ok with that.