The right place, at the right time....

For most of my growing up years i lived in a town called Park Forest, Illinois. In many ways it was an idyllic little suburb to grow up in.

We had a great Park district program, every summer, on the 4th of July you could go to the hill behind Freedom Hall and watch the fireworks. The Aqua Center was where all my friends and i spent every day during the summer trying to impress the girls (and yes once upon a time i went swimming every day, sometimes once in the morning and then again at night)! The "craters" right down the street from my house was a BMX cyclers' dream come true. And of course you could go to the shrine of authentic south suburban pizza by visiting Aurelio's flagship store over in Homewood, it's just THAT good!

My mom never... and i mean NEVER drove me anywhere... if i couldn't get there by walking then it was obviously too far and i really didn't need to go there in the first place!

In the south central area of Cook county with portions of the village in Will county, it in many ways just didn't seem to "fit" this part of Illinois. But since a significant portion of what is now Park Forest was once a stop on the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves in the 19th century perhaps, growing up in that town makes sense after all.

It was here that i had the lesson reinforced that the color of a person's skin did not make them more or less valuable as a human being...
It was here that i had the lesson reinforced that should i never allow anyone or anything else to take my personal dignity away from me....
It was here that i had the lesson reinforced that if i thought i could achieve it, then nothing could stop me except me.
It was a town where whites lived next door to blacks who lived next door to Hispanics who lived next door to Asians who lived next door to people who had no real clue what their ethnicity was... and looking back on it now, i never thought too much about it but the experience of growing up in that town has left an indelible mark on me...

Perhaps that is why i have long sought to be part of another community that creates that same sort of atmosphere... but this time not for me but for my children and my children's children.

And i believe that community is THE church... my prayer is that i can be part of a movement that will see this as part of its' destiny... to truly become a house of prayer for all nations... or more literally all people. It's just who i am.