True Signs of Hope

I want to tell you about a few places where I have seen hope lately. The other day a friend of mine took me out for lunch and a beer. Sign of hope one, friends who will take you out for a beer when you are having a rough time. What amazed me though was what Tony was doing. Tony is supper busy. He works a job that is far more then full time. On top of that he is the youth worker at the church I attended. On top of that he helps out with the Lutheran Urban Mission and on top of that he is on his neighborhood board, and on top of that decided to start a volleyball league for inner-city kids. A few local pastors (nope, no Lutheran ones) gave him some money for uniforms etc. So he put up some posters. And guess what 26 kids showed up. Tony is a volleyball coach and so he put them through the ropes and he coached them like he would any one else. Guess what these kids, kids that I am sure other people write off or are even afraid of, loved it. Tony told me about how they worked and played and responded to his coaching like the best of them. Well because they were. Tony – another sign of hope.

 

After lunch with Tony I went to a coffee shop that I had been to once before. Mondragon. The last time I was there I stop off because it had the same name as a town where a friend of mine comes from in France. That time I had my head buried in our national convention docket. This time as I was walking in I had a great conversation with a man sitting on the steps. He was homeless, and sat there with his toothbrush in hand. He told me how he had come back to Winnipeg after the winter and how he love the place especially this coffee shop. He told me how great the people were. And one by one as people would come in they would greet this man by name. Something rarely seen in any church I have been in. Then inside it was equally fascinating. Mondragon is a workers co-op. In other words those people serving coffee, they owned the place together. My goodness the service was great. Better yet there was a book store at the back on about every justice issue you could think of. Talk about a fabulous resource center. The washrooms even had signs on them explaining why there weren’t the usual man and women signs. They reminded the person entering that people identify themselves in different ways, people understand themselves in different ways and if something small can be done like taking away those male and female stick people signs, well they didn’t have a committee, they simply removed them.  Then before I was going I struck up a conversation with a women reading a book on post-colonial theory. An interest of mine and I hadn’t seen the book before. It turns out she was doing her PhD in English. In that short conversation she even taught me a thing or too about early modern English.

 

So there is a sign of hope. A place where workers work together to create a just work environment where each person who works there is an owner and they cooperate. A place where the homeless man on the front step is not chased away but greeted by name while he proclaim the gospel of the place and welcomes people in. A place where brokenness of the world is given a place and knowledge about the issues and how to address it is there for people to learn. A place where not only are the homeless welcome but people working on the PhD’s as well and they are welcome to share the best of what they have learned. A place where even the bathrooms make sure that everyone feels welcome. If you want to see the kingdom of God, I found a coffee shop where it shimmers through. 

Oh and the "Signs of Hope" name, yep one more thing from the work I did. Taken and being used by the church that tossed me out.