I recently attended a retreat focusing on "Journeying With Jesus in Our Singleness." The 14 women in attendance ranged in age from 26 to 73.
Columns
Ed Spivey Jr. 5-01-1994
Our top story this month has the theological world "all in a tizzy," which in the original Greek means "something much too nuanced for you to understand since you’re just a lay person."
James W. Douglass 5-01-1994
Jim Douglass traveled to Bosnia to continue his work of building support for a peace pilgrimage of world religious leaders to Sarajevo.
Marybeth Shea 4-01-1994
If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come. —Chinese Proverb
Jim Wallis 4-01-1994
Not in polite company. That’s where you were not supposed to talk about either politics or religion. Remember?
Rose Marie Berger 4-01-1994
We got off the 11th Street bus in downtown Washington and headed toward the people gathering on the 10th Street overpass. A man in his early 40s fell into step with us.
Jim Wallis 2-01-1994
Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, a group of evangelical Christians met together in the dilapidated Chicago YMCA on Wabash Street.
Carey Burkett 2-01-1994
FEASTING IS JUST half the story. To have "Sunday dinner" implies plainer weekday meals. Holiday banquets include foods not seen the rest of the year.
Ed Spivey Jr. 2-01-1994
The enormous challenge of revamping our nation's health care system has congressional leaders promising to work harder than ever. Some are even considering returning to work after lunches.
Joyce Hollyday 2-01-1994
As we prepare once more to commemorate the birth of Martin Luther King Jr., and to celebrate Black History Month, I am grateful to have encountered the Delany sisters.
Jim Wallis 1-01-1994
The widespread popular discontent that so defined the 1992 election campaign continued unabated into the first year of the new president's term. It would not have mattered who won.
Carey Burkett 1-01-1994
MY 1994 NEW YEAR'S resolution - to break loose from serious menu ruts by planning further ahead - has already led to more time at a favorite activity: paging through cookbooks.
Joyce Hollyday 1-01-1994
A full moon. A plunge in temperature. Transylvania County, North Carolina. Conditions were just right for Halloween...
Ed Spivey Jr. 1-01-1994
Well, that's some magazine so far, eh? Malevolent global corporations, the bleakness of Nicaragua, and the Holocaust. What is this, National Public Radio? I've seen more laughs in a jar of mustard.
Joyce Hollyday 6-01-1992
10:30 a.m. The knocking at the front door was loud and persistent. A D.C. police officer wanted to know if I had heard anything unusual around dawn that morning.
Nothing unusual. The streets had been noisy the night before—folks out sitting on their stoops until late and playing music loudly in celebration of the warm weather that had just arrived. People were in and out of the crackhouse across the street. But there had been no gunshots, no cries for help that night.
The police officer took me to the porch two doors down—Thelma's porch. The large front window had been knocked out; shattered glass lay everywhere. Thelma came out and explained that somebody had picked up a chair off her porch and threw it through the window. He was being chased by a man with a gun at the time and took refuge in Thelma's living room.
"This is it for me," Thelma said. "I've lived here for 26 years. Raised my kids here. They all graduated from Cardoza and got good jobs." She nodded toward the high school at the end of the block. "But I can't take it anymore."
It wasn't only the violence that was getting to Thelma. Her landlord had raised the rent, she said, to $1,100 a month—an outrageous sum for a small house on which he refused to do repairs. Thelma vowed to be gone as soon as she could figure out where to go. Her grandchildren, who live with her and play hide-and-seek on the long row of our connected porches, will be gone as well.
Jim Wallis 6-01-1992
The room was bathed in soft light as spirituals quietly played in the background. More than 100 people came to see the one many called "a good friend" and to say their last goodbyes. It was the first wake we'd ever had at the Sojourners Neighborhood Center. The next morning the funeral was held here too. It was the appropriate place—the place where James Starks had come almost every day for many years. It was where he had become part of a family and found a home.
About 10 years ago, James was sitting out on the stoop one Sunday morning when someone invited him to come to worship with Sojourners Community. After a few more weeks of invitations, he came—and he stayed. Before long, James became involved in the food program and soon was one of its most tireless workers. Many stories were told at James' funeral. We cried and we laughed and decided that James would have been glad for both. Mostly we were very grateful, even in our sadness, for the life of one who had touched each of ours.
On most days, James would go out to pick up food wherever we could get it. Someone said, "Whenever you saw the van, you saw James." Another co-worker told of a pickup at the food bank one winter day in an absolute blizzard that dissuaded everyone but James. He made it all the way there and back and didn't stop until the van came to an abrupt halt in a snowbank in the center's driveway. The next day 300 families had food to take home.
But James' favorite thing was to take the food back out to people who most needed it. He was known to make up to 13 deliveries in a single day, mostly to senior citizens who could no longer get out. He brought more than food, he brought his famous smile and the comfort of good company. He so loved to visit people and stay to talk that one co-worker testified at his funeral, "I had to go with him just to make sure he didn't stay all day!" When there wasn't food to pick up or deliver, James would do whatever else needed to be done around the center. He was the ultimate volunteer.