Help us raise $6,000 before 2011!

God is alive and well here at DOOR Hollywood and we are certainly thankful!  Alayna, Alex, Brady, Josh, Kyle, and Robert are settled in, deeply invested in their work with the homeless as well as the families surrounding 5846 Gregory!  (Click on their names for their ongoing blogs!)  And we need your help to keep this mission thriving: we currently are paying $12,000 annually in property taxes while we work tirelessly to re-establish our legitimate tax-exempt status with California.  All papers are in order and have been for over a year now, but the state is moving slowly.  That $12,000 could nearly cover the living expenses of one Dweller for a year, or it could allow us to send 20 local students from low-income families on a week-long service learning trip in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Miami, or San Antonio, covering program and travel.  Please help while we are in this waiting game, and please pray that we come out from under this requirement soon!  Click here to go directly to our credit card donation processing page.

From our sunrise hike this week.

God is alive and well in this city!

Merry Christmas from DOOR Hollywood!  Click on any photo to see more of the team in action.

Posada, December 13, 2010

Listening, by Kyle

My housemate Robert and I were heading to West Hollywood to check out a free movie that I won through a contest. As we were getting there, Robert was telling me about his job on PATH’s homeless outreach team.  They offer rides to a hospital if someone is hurt, offer advice, give a bag of food, and let the homeless know that PATH is willing to help them with a 2nd chance at life.   Robert brought up something I never thought about.  A lot of homeless have lost their self-esteem or lack the courage to seek a job. Why?  What if you’d been out on the street for months, or years, and people stare at you as they walk by, never talk to you, and just ignore you.  You may feel hopeless and think that if you tried to get a job, that boss would ignore you just like the people on the street.   So, one of the things the outreach team does is to meet the homeless and start a conversation with them.  The outreach team tries to see the same homeless people a few times every month so that those people know they aren’t forgotten.  That may help their hearts to heal, become stronger, and realize that not everybody is the same.  LA is a big city and it’s our job not only to help the homeless but spread the word about what we offer to help even more homeless with a 2nd chance at life.

From Kyle's blog: You Will Never Go Where God is Not

Fall Festival!

Thanks to everyone who came and to everyone who helped with the fall festival yesterday at 5846 Gregory!  It was a ton of fun, great new relationships were made, and please pray that they blossom from here on out.

To see more photos, click on either one here.

Blessings, Matthew

Brothers and Sisters

This is God's Message: Attend to matters of justice. Set things right between people. Rescue victims from their exploiters. Don't take advantage of the homeless, the orphans, the widows. Stop the murdering! – Jeremiah 22:3, The Message

In a world where Glenn Beck has urged Christians to "run as fast as [they] can" from churches who care about social justice while even the Old Testament commands us to “attend to matters of justice”; in a world where some Christians walk alongside those in the margins while other Christians look on declaring judgment and punishment, no wonder the world is confused about Christianity.  Seems Christians are confused, too.  

Part of my journey involves serving as an improvisational theater and writing workshop leader in several Michigan prisons and detention centers.  At the time, this was not about being a Christian, per se, but about my distaste for the way society so readily throws people away.  “They’ve committed a crime, so they are getting what they deserve,” is what I heard, what I still hear, all the time.  But not much more than that, that’s the end of the story for those of us who don’t live with the unspoken expectation that incarceration is more likely than attending college.  So, as a college kid, I got involved with the Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan.  Much to the initial dismay of my family, I was working with men with a life sentence, typically meaning that they had committed some form of murder.  Amidst working alongside the men inside to pull together a play about redemption, healing, and forgiveness, drawing from real-life experiences and hope, and putting on a show for fellow inmates and community members, I met a man we’ll call Leroy, a man from Detroit.

Leroy had a booming laugh that you’d feel in your bones, was 6’5”, 300 pounds, and loved to give bear hugs.  I’ll admit, my first hug from him, I was a little nervous.  He could literally have squeezed the life right out of me.  Through the several months we worked together, I came to learn that he was a Vietnam Vet, came back traumatized and over-medicated, got thrown in jail for drug addiction and dealing.  After serving his sentence, he was on a type of house arrest for his parole.  One night, his sister went into premature labor and had nobody to watch her infant son.  She called Leroy, and he hesitated, but thought it would be understood and explainable.  Until the unthinkable happened: during that night, someone began to break into his sister’s house, into the bedroom where the baby was sleeping.  Leroy reacted, charged at the perpetrator, and startled him so that he fell through the window, off the fire escape, to his death.   Now Leroy is in for life: murder while violating terms of his parole.   Does Leroy deserve another chance?  That’s not my place to judge, though I feel he ought to.  (AKA: Should the thousands upon thousands of dollars Michigan is spending to keep him locked up go towards improving schools?)  Was it worthwhile to meet with him in the marginalized realm of his “correctional facility?”  Absolutely.  For so many reasons, including the fact that all along the way, Leroy prayed.  For me.  He openly prayed that God would touch my heart in good time.  And years later when that ultimately occurred, what memory of being embraced and lifted up did I feel?  Who’s face would appear in my mind’s eye?  Leroy’s.  The face of God in the image of Leroy.   

In that spirit, when I heard that Professor Buzz Alexander, co-founder of the Prison Creative Arts Project and longtime friend, was coming to LA to promote his new book, Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?, I decided DOOR Hollywood needed to host this event.  Last Friday at Mama’s Hot Tamales in MacArthur Park, Buzz read to a diverse audience of about 40 people.  During the discussion that followed, incredible questions were raised: Are we any safer as a society for increasing our prison population sevenfold over the past 15 years? Do things like the sex-offender registry actually stop these crimes from re-occurring, or does it allow us to gloss over and ignore the fact that the vast majority of sexual offenses happen within homes, families, and with acquaintances? What does it mean to humanize instead of dehumanize?  What should forgiveness really look like?  And then, I received a comment from a non-Christian guest, saying that she was so surprised to hear about Christians who care about justice, as opposed to judgment.   Her idea of Christianity looked like Bible verses on signs proclaiming hate.  Can we blame her?

Current Dweller Alex recently blogged on her experience participating in a walk to raise money for AIDS research:  As the walk began we came up against radical Christian protesters holding awful signs declaring things such as “Homo Sex is a Sin” with scripture references of John 3:16, “For God So Loved the World….” I am unsure how this verse of salvation and love supported their message of hatred and exclusion.  Why they needed to come and protest a walk raising money to find a cure to a disease that is killing millions of people around the world I do not know or understand. I DO understand the gospel and the light that I have been studying it in. The greatest commandment Jesus gave us was to love God and love our neighbors. Our neighbors are not geographical; our neighbors are all of God’s people; every tribe and every nation. As we walked past the protesters we also walked past the group in their “Jesus Saves” t-shirts. Suddenly I loved these shirts….

Jesus did come to save the world.  The World.  For everyone.  Even people who confuse their need to discern with God’s, and only God’s, power to judge.  Even people with AIDS.  Even people who hate people with AIDS.  Even Glenn Beck.  Even you.  Even me.  All of us, brothers and sisters.

Peace be with you all,

Matthew

First Impressions of Hollywood, from Robert

Work is interesting. I’m on PATH’s Street Outreach Team based out of Hollywood. Here’s what I tell people when they ask me what exactly it is we do on Outreach:

Basically, we spend our time in the various neighborhoods of Los Angeles looking for the homeless. When we find them, we approach them and talk to them (if they'll let us), meeting them where they are and offering a lunch and, sometimes, a hygiene kit. What we're trying to do is build trust with these people, our clients, with the eventual goal of motivating them to come in off the street to shelter where they can get help.

Now that sounds pretty cool, but it really doesn't encapsulate everything I've experienced in these last two weeks. What it amounts to is that we spend a lot of time riding around in a van looking for people and then looking for parking. But it also means that we spend our time getting ignored and rejected. It means shaking hands with people who don't look clean (because they aren't). It means getting yelled at and hated. It means meeting people who genuinely want help but are fed up with the system. It means joy when dropping off a client at shelter. It means listening to a man in a worn-out wheelchair quote Maya Angelou while talking about the social division that exists between residents of West Hollywood (with an average rent greater than $2200) and the homeless. It means asking a delusional client if he needs any clothes as he eats the baloney sandwich you just gave him across the street from the Beverly Hills Gucci.

It also means sitting in meetings listening to law enforcement speak about homeless as trespassers and criminals, which they may be, though it's difficult to reconcile this image when I spend my days looking into their faces and listening to their stories. After all, where else are they to go besides street corners, park benches and alleyways full of dumpsters?

Did you know that there's an area of central Los Angeles called Skid Row that is widely accepted as the homeless capital of the nation, meaning that there are more homeless per square mile than anywhere else in the country? Even if you have heard of Skid Row, you may not be aware that there is a law in place only in that area of Los Angeles that prevents any person from sleeping in the streets between the hours of 5am and 9pm. Initially, the law was in effect 24 hours a day, but the State's Supreme Court ruled that, without enough beds in the city to shelter the homeless, criminalizing sleeping in public was unconstitutional. Estimates of the Los Angeles county homeless population vary between 48,000 and 90,000. There are 13,000 shelter beds.

Now, I want you to take a second and step off a ledge with me. How many empty bedrooms would you estimate are in Los Angeles? How many are in your own home? What if they all were opened?

So, I don't know. What I'm feeling right now is a lot of frustration with the problem and the systems and locales we're working in. This weekend, Brady and I went to see a movie in Universal City, which is like hyper-Los Angeles. Basically, it's an outdoor mall dedicated to the bright and flashy lights of consumerism (literally, every store advertises with huge neon signs). It's a place teeming with excess and higher prices charged just because, at this place, you're meant to feel like you're somewhere special. I wanted to vomit. I thought about Eddie, fresh from having two stints placed around his heart, still wearing hospital bracelets, heart-beat sensor stuck to his chest, pulling two grocery carts behind his wheelchair that looks to lose its front wheels at any moment.

Prayers

Please pray for the people that my roommates and encounter in our work. And pray (this is a big one) that God can use us and the many other Christians here to change the culture a city that is often blind to its shortcomings. Lastly, let us not forget to pray for ourselves (because I often do), that we may see and hear God everyday.

Every Day a New Adventure, by Alayna

It’s been a busy orientation week for us. Six of us live in this duplex on Gregory Avenue: Alex and I on the girls’ side and Brady, Josh, Kyle, and Robert on the boys’. We have begun crafting our house covenant, a contract we will all sign that outlines how we agree to live together and hold each other accountable as an intentional Christian community. We have spent some time evaluating the unique spiritual gifts each of us brings to the table. We are learning to value and use our individual strengths.

We have all participated in a morning of service together. We volunteered at Project Angel Food, an organization that prepares and delivers 1,600 meals every day, 365 days per year, for people with terminal illnesses.

We’ve had dinners with several of the past “Dwellers,” the people who have lived in this house on Gregory Avenue in the years before us. It’s been interesting to hear their stories and their advice, to see the lasting relationships that formed from their year here.

One of my favorite field trips from the week was Homeboy Industries and Homegirl Café. Homeboy Industries was started by a pastor who saw firsthand how gangs affected the young men and women and their families in his neighborhood—the violence, prison sentences, and deaths. He saw how difficult it was to get out of that lifestyle once a person was tattooed or had a record. So he began to give them an alternative, paying them out of his own pocket to work for him. I loved the tshirt that our former gang member/tour guide was wearing: “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” Homeboy Industries has become the largest gang intervention program in the country; it includes Homeboy Bakery, Silkscreen, Maintenace, Merchandise, and Homegirl Café. They provide all sorts of classes, and they can even get their gang tattoos removed for free! I got goosebumps hearing about all the success stories that have come from that place—and it all started with just one man.

Yesterday, I practiced my route to work: bike one mile to the bus stop, put my bike on a rack on the front of the bus, ride 20 minutes, then bike the last couple blocks to my agency. I can already tell that I will have a lot of stories from riding public transportation every day.

So this is my life right now, still in the transition to starting our jobs and neighborhood ministry. It is such an encouragement to hear from home, comments on my first blog, emails and Facebook messages, texts. I’ve been busy so I haven’t gotten to respond to everything, but I just wanted you to know that I do appreciate it. Thank you all for that.

I can’t wait to begin working at my agency and in the neighborhood. More updates to come!

~Alayna

"Hide it under a bushel, No!" or, Blogging Commences

Here's another way to put it: You're here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We're going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don't think I'm going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I'm putting you on a light stand. Now that I've put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine!- Matthew 5:14-16, The Message

I feel like its going to be a great year (of course I feel that way about every year though.) I am living in a house with five other similar minded young adult volunteers. Our house is located next to Paramount Studios, just a few minutes walk from Hollywood and Vine. It is all quite exciting but also quite whelming. I'm not overwhelmed yet, but I think parts of my brain are. We have gone to the beach once; walked to Grauman's Chinese theater on the walk of fame; prepared meals for a massive operation that gives 1600 meals to people with terminal illnesses every day; and stumbled into a free big name band concert in a music store where we just wanted to buy a CD. - From Josh's blog, Adventurer Friend

I will be working 32 hours a week as a case worker with Alegria. Alegria is a ministry in Hollywood that serves families who were previously homeless and have at least one family member affected by HIV or AIDS. The ministry provides these families with transitional housing, health care, and works to equip these families in the transition back to housed society. 16 families are currently housed in our facilities. I am excited and also intimidated by the work expected of me at the agency. Please keep this ministry in your prayers. - From Alex's blog, Changes

After dinner, Mrs. Kerr asked us to read a part of the chapter in Romans. It was about serving God. Mrs. Kerr asked us what we think about it and what do we accept the hardest will be for us? Each of us told our part. I told the Kerr family that I hope I become closer to God each day and stay on his path and understand his ways, not mine. Then I was trying to tell her the verse of Proverbs 3: 5-6. I didn't even give her a clue and she just said, "Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths." Then I said yes, that is it. - From Kyle's blog, You Will Never Go Where God is Not

We have also begun meeting the kids in the neighborhood as they walk by, curious about the new people at La Casa de la Comunidad. The Community House has a longstanding reputation in the neighborhood as a safe place for the neighborhood kids to come for tutoring and fellowship. They have already been asking when the tutoring will begin again. Alex and I are both anxious to begin work in the community garden as well. I must admit all this work at the Community House is what I’m most excited for. - From Alayna's Blog, the space between

Please pray this week for my fellow YAV's as we spend this week in meditation and worship to help us focus on the journeys that lie before us. Pray for the friends and families we left behind and the new friends we'll make at our sites, and pray for the little things we can all do to make someone's day better. "Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast." -Psalm 139 v7-10. - From Robert's blog, Keepin' On