On moving. (I think it's gonna be a long long time.)

We almost bought a house on Paseo last year. And if you want to look at the situation through any lens that makes rational sense, we should have bought it. It had nine bedrooms, and room to easily add two more in the basement with minimal effort. Only three baths, but again, we could have added another in the basement if need be. Recently remodeled, all concessions agreed upon, and five other people willing to move in and fill the place out, help pay for stuff, maintain the place. And the porch! Such a porch, my friends, as you have only seen in fairy tales. Columns and good places for sitting and everything. Not to mention room to garden. Oh, and we were going to pay less than 130K, no down payment. Jill and I could have just barely covered the payments by ourselves, but with five other people moving in, it would have been about 250 bucks a month with all utilities and a contribution to fund for house emergencies. Everybody even had their own room if they wanted. And we could more easily share with those without, and open the house for people who needed a place to stay for a couple of days, and it was right across from Habitat from Humanity so we could easily volunteer there. And get the benefits of living in a close community like learning how to be a better person when someone's a jerk to you, and how to be less of a jerk yourself. Like I said, heck of a deal.

In the end, we decided we shouldn't do it. And it hurt a lot because I'd been looking forward to it for a long time. I'd even made a community house one of the things I'd decided to do with the year, based on a sermon Tim Keel gave on how deciding to do something is really important for anything to ever actually happen that you want. How, in our culture, having open choice is really important to people, but that cutting off some options and making the choice is the path to wisdom and person growth.

Jill and I told people that the main reason we broke the contract, and lost our earnest money, and left people who wanted to move in with us in the lurch was that the house was too small. Which is true. There was no room for people to get married or have kids, or for more than three or four other people come live with us. And we were going to start cramped given how we wanted to give the married people and the ladies some privacy.

But the real reason, and one that we talk about less, is that we thought and felt that God was indicating to us to not move in. I mean, not out loud or anything, just really clearly in the circumstances. A woman from church what we didn't really know and who didn't know anything about our situation or plans calling out of the blue with had really good and wise things to say right to Jill's heart just as one example.

I think part of the reason I say that it was too small, and not that it was God's nudging is that I can be an awfully rationalizing and accommodating person. I like to put things in terms that other people understand, for one. I mean, if you're the kind of person who believes that the things that are real are the things that you can test and observe, then the idea that Jill and I think that some supernatural being that no one can see, and who seems kinda flighty and elusive most of the time, came along and influenced our decision to not buy a house, it wouldn't make any sense to you.

But that's not even accurate because, while I do want to put things in terms that people understand, a more important reason that I talk about the house being too small is that it can be kind of embarrassing to be the person who tries to follow the supernatural being in a culture still so obsessed with rationalism and empiricism. Even most of the Christian subculture thinks that if it's not 'provable', it's not real. (But that's going down a path leading to a delightful and complex blog post essay on modernism and post-modernism that I'm pretty sure most of you want to read right now. If you do, leave a comment, and I'm more than willing to whip that sucker up with plenty of relevant examples and fresh analogies in plain and direct language. Yay, essay!)

But YHWH, to me, doesn't seem like the kind of person who likes to get tied down to a particular way of doing things. Other people have said this, but I really think he's got that feminine passion to not get all figured out. He likes to get pursued and wooed more than categorized and dissected.

Now, I've got this friend Steve, who's a real deep thinker on a lot of things, being a history major and a wide reader of books with uncomfortably bland covers and all, and he was around for all of the conversations and meetings for planning to buy the house that I just mentioned. He's already doing something like what we wanted to do in the Paseo house, but a little further east, on the east side of Kansas City, in a neighborhood that I'd like to live in if it wasn't so far away from where I am, and what I do, and where I work right now. Of course, I could change where I am, and what I do, and where I work, and move over there sometime, or just suck it up. But I haven't made that choice yet.

But Steve moved over there on purpose, 28th and Benton, essentially, and ask anyone who knows about crime and poverty and they will tell you that this is not a nice part of our city. He didn't even move there from somewhere nicer in KC; he moved there from a place he loved living in Minnesota to come create a community house over there on he east side.

I have this theory that there really is an Illuminati, and there really is a shadow government that runs everything away from the public eye, and America really is an empire a lot like the British and Roman ones. But there's a catch. Every person is a member or an emperor and most people don't even know it. Everyone's actions and inactions make ripples that affect and effect all kinds of things all over the place. What a person chooses to buy, or eat, or where to go for fun, or what to believe, matters on a grand scale. Most of the time, we don't even see the impacts of our decisions.

My whole world is like that. I don't know who built my laptop, or where the wheat for the bread for the sandwich I'll have for dinner at Panera tonight came from (Frontega Chicken FTW! ). It's just not convenient or viable for me to. I have no way of knowing whether the laptop builder guy likes his job, or if he feels like it's a dead-end and wishes he could find something where he's valued for who he is but he makes too much now to quit, or if it's his life and he just loves building laptops and seeing them go out with the hope that someone really enjoys the experience of laptop ownership.

Same for who grows the wheat. Maybe it comes from a faceless agribusiness where most of the work is done from a computer substation like W.P. Kineslla rails against in Shoeless Joe, or maybe it's one of those Kansas farmers who we see on billboards on the way to Emporia who went to the trouble and expense of going to ag college so he could continue the family business, he loves it so much. Who can tell?

So, it's really easy to get caught up in participating in and encouraging slavery or oppression or cutting down forests in places that need them without knowing about it.

I'm the kind of person who doesn't like to think about racism. That's because most of the people I know are very loving and accepting of people from all kinds of places and backgrounds. And I also have always thought that the less I know about racists, the less likely I am to become one. If nobody points out a difference, I doubt I'd know it. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but it's how I've lived.

But that doesn't mean racism isn't there, and it doesn't mean that people end up participating in it even if they hate it. Steve says he sees racism all the time. Anything east of Prospect gets written off as a bad place to live. Just ask anybody. There are about five houses with any white people living within a ten block radius from him. And his area is pretty run down, and people don't seem to care. It's even blocked off from most of the rest of the city by the infrastructure.

Where are all the cool places to live in Kansas City, MO if you're social conscious or urban or hip or whatever? Westport, downtown, the River Market, Brookside, Hyde Park. Any of those east of Prospect? Any of those east of Paseo? No. Now, is that some sort of malicious city planner doing that? Nope. It's just people being people.

This is part of why Steve wants to move back to Minnesota. Because all the cool places here in town that he likes to be in and hang out in and spend money in only perpetuate the existing system, and don't do anything to help his neighborhood. There's not much over on the east side for him to do besides sit in his house and fix it up. There aren't a lot of jobs, and there are only, like, nine restaurants, and there aren't any cool anarchist coffee shops at all. Ok, there aren't really any of those in KC, but hey, a Steve can dream, can't he?

I think that's a pretty legitimate reason to want to move. You feel like anything you do is either not something you like to do, or it's perpetuating a system you don't like. It's a tough place to be in. The need to get out.

I used to see something like this all the time growing up in Olathe, only shallow. People who wanted to just get out. Where they were didn't fit who they were. Gotta get to New York, or California, or Westport to get happy. Once they got somewhere else, anywhere else, they could finally get happy.

And then I see a lot of other people that don't feel stuck where they are, just want a change, want to go to a city with different opportunities. Or, like when Jill and I lived in Emporia and desperately wanted to get back to Kansas City to be near our friends and our family and good shopping opportunities like the Great Mall of the Great Plains, which looks pretty awesome when you've been living in Emporia, believe me. Once we finally did move back to Kansas City, we liked seeing our family, and those of our friends who were still around, and the Great Mall which was great for the first and last time in its existence, but we really missed our people and our life back in Emporia. I felt like we hadn't really been living there for the last few months, just waiting to get out. So we missed out on a lot of good living.

After we decided not to move to the cool house on Paseo, we were at a loss as to what to do next. God shifted us away from this house, we thought, should we shift away from doing any community house, do we need to be more segregated? What next? So we moved to Westport, because it's close to church and decided to wait. Decided to live out the things we wanted to do in the Paseo house however we could manage in Westport. Not because things were better there, but because it was simply a place we could go and we needed to move.

It's hard to try to live in a community, and it's hard to live the way Jill and I want to, loving and giving ourselves up for the people around us, and living simply, and being conscious that God made the earth and likes it a whole lot and that we can try to live in such a way as to treat it well. And try to learn to sacrifice ourselves for other people that aren't around us yet.

But I think these are things you can do wherever you are. And I'm not saying to never move or anything, but I think it's all tied up in what Tim Keel was saying about choices. In this case, making a conscious choice to live somewhere for a reason is important. And mostly, that conscious decision should be to live well where ever you are, not look for happiness somewhere else.

I know it could sound like I'm bashing Steve, or other people who want to go somewhere else to live than where they are. And I do want Steve to stay in Kansas City because I think he's a great person and I enjoy his company and he challenges the way I think. All of which I like. So I'm selfish on that count. And I really like having the people around that I love. Hear that Brianna?

And I like Kansas City. A lot, really. I don't think it's the best place to live, or the best. city. evar, but I want to live here because it's where I live. If I can't be who I want here, where I am, I don't think I can be who I want to be anywhere else. If I'm not a missionary here, how could I be one somewhere else? If I'm not a writer with this job, how could I be one with a different one? If I don't love my neighbors, how would having worse-off ones help? Maybe it would, and maybe I could. I don't know for sure. Circumstances and experiences do have an awfully big impact on who I am. But I do know that I need to live well right here, where I am, if I expect to live well anywhere.

And then I can imagine Steve saying, because he likes to challenge me, "Do we even need to live well at all?" But that's another post for another day.