reality bites

Ok, so only if the neighbor's dog was named Reality, which it isn't. The name is Rex. And Rex bites. Rex bites hard.

Rex is a wee little doggie, guarding the neighbor's yard with his equally wee buddy, Maya. The mutts only come up to about my ankle. Yet two of the three roommates have now recieved brutal bruises and teethmarks, sustained through jeans nonetheless. Leah is sole the hold-out, and she is realizing that she is wise just to shout over the gate rather than enter Rex's turf. Because seriously, Rex bites HARD.

But for some of our neighbors, reality does bite. Kids whose fathers are in prison or have been deported. Women who are raising children alone. Teens who are attempting to become adults with no one offering them guidance. Entire families living in less-than-sanitary conditions, unable to stand up to the landlord because they don't have anyplace to go.

It is this last group that is particularly on our minds this week. Most of you will remember that we moved across the street a couple months ago, leaving behind a dilapidated trailer with a mold issue that had left us coughing for months on end. The place is a health hazard. Yet is has come to our attention in the last week that the landlord had no intentions of doing any work on it before placing another family in there. He simply gave the outside a fresh coat of white paint, while the inside remains as unhealthy as when we left it. Never before has the concept of a "whitewashed tomb" been so real to me, friends. He is shining up the outside, while leaving the inside full of death.

We need wisdom in this situation. We cannot, in good conscience, watch a child be moved into that place. Yet speaking up could be incredibly harmful to our own relationship with our landlord. Even if calls made to groups like Code Enforcement are anonymous, there will be no mistaking who initiated them. Pray for us. The Bible calls us so clearly to speak up on behalf of those who can't speak up for themselves (Prov. 31). Pray that we can do this wisely and well.

And while you're at it, pray that none of us gets rabies. Because while God has made our own reality beautiful (even when difficult), Rex just plain bites.

the boys are back in town

May until August...wow. It has been an incrediby busy season for girls of the trailer park. We've done more traveling than we anticipated...Alaska, Russia, Michigan, Oklahoma, Indiana, California, and all around Colorado. Travel remains one of the awkward reminders that we still have one foot in the middle class world, where people have both the time and the money to travel frequently. Needless to say, our busy travel schedules have made it difficult to be consistent in just being at home. Pray for us in that: it is the most important thing to us, and also the hardest. Pray as well that God would constantly draw us to being in prayer about our neighborhood. It's easy for us to forget to sit and be still sometimes!

The summer has been an interesting one with kiddos. For the first couple of months, a few kids were gone visiting other family members, so we had only three kids around (most of the time, only one). Recently, however, all have returned and new ones have showed up, and we are back to having a passel of youngin's running up and down the hall, crawling up the walls (literally), and eating burgers on the porch. The kid we lost to DHS so many months ago showed back up at our door a few weeks ago, bringing with him three other rowdy boys. To see his face again and to hear his mom talk about how well things are going has brought such joy to us. It was a gift we didn't see coming at all.

With the summer heat, Thursdays are about barbecues and trips to the park, about water balloons and squirt guns. In the coming months, the plan is to begin having our adults (all of whom have traveled) share about the countries they have visited (or in many cases, have lived in). This week, we kick things off with a dear friend who spent a year living in China. The goal is this: to continue having fun, while sneaking in some opportunities for our kids to learn and to gain a bigger picture of the world they live in. We'll be moving from Eastern Europe, to Africa, to South America and beyond. I'm so excited for this. One of the things I have noticed most about low-income kiddos is that their perspective on the world is very limited. Their horizons are narrow. Yet there is so much for them to explore, and some many places to dream about! We hope that in gaining a broader picture of the world, their hopes for what the future can hold will broaden as well.

I hope to be more consistent here in the days to come. Either way, I say it again: Thank you for being a part of life in the trailer park. It's a beautiful thing!