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| “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
To loose the chains of injustice,
and untie the chords of the yoke,
To set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not the share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter---
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
and not to turn away from you own flesh and blood?
Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
Then you righteousness will go before you,
and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
You will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger
and malicious talk,
and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed.
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.” (Isaiah 59:6-10, NIV)
This is one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. It is a passage that I can read again and again, and every time it startles me, captivates me, and challenges me. In the passages before it, Isaiah describes a group of people who fast publicly and pompously, yet on the days they fast, they quarrel amongst themselves and cheat their laborers out of money. God is furious at their lip-service, and reveals his heart to them in the above passage, a heart that is sacrificial, a heart full of fiery justice, and a heart of fierce, bleeding compassion.
Having lived in the inner-city for the past four years, I have seen the injustice, oppression, poverty and hunger described in Isaiah manifested in my own neighborhood. I have heard the stutter of bullets ringing out in the middle of the night, and I have met children whose drug-dealing parents got them addicted at nine years of age. Down the street from me, refugees from Somalia squeeze their eight-person families into cramped apartments that were originally built as small college dormitories. Since I’ve moved here, I’ve met children who only eat one meal a day--their free school lunches. Injustice. Oppression. Poverty. Hunger. We live in a time like Isaiah’s. How should we live in such times as these? How can we “Loose the chains of injustice,” or “Satisfy the needs of the oppressed”? How do we “Provide the poor wanderer with shelter” and “Spend ourselves in behalf of the hungry”?
This summer from June 2nd until July 21st, I have the opportunity to try to answer some of those questions for myself. I am going to be part of an internship program called City Lights. While at City Lights, I will be joining a group of other college students from across the globe to live and serve in the city of St. Louis. City Lights students will be serving in various capacities; some will work at a summer-school for inner-city youth, some will work at a free clinic in the immigrant/refugee district. There is a housing project, where students will work at rehabbing derelict, low-income houses for the elderly and widows in the community. In one of the projects, students will serve immigrants and refugees by visiting them in their homes, training them in ESL and American culture, and resettling them into homes. When not working, students will be pursuing God’s heart, and specifically studying the scriptures for themes of justice, mercy, compassion, living in community, and racial reconciliation.
I am tremendously excited about my involvement in this project, both for the opportunity to witness God’s presence and faithfulness in the midst of my beautiful, broken city, and also for the opportunity to immerse myself in meditations of God’s word. However, in order for me to participate in the project, I must raise 1400 dollars in funds. I cannot do this on my own, and so, I ask you as friends, family and brothers and sisters in Christ, to enter into this fund-raising process with me. I am not asking solely for financial support, I would also like you to pray for me for both trust in God that I will be able to raise my funds, and also for prayers that the money will be provided. If you feel compelled to give, please make your donations to “InterVarsity Christian Fellowship“, and send them to City Lights, c/o Gerry Chappeau, 735 Harvard Ave, St. Louis, MO, 63130, indicating that the funds are to be designated for my support.
Whether you are able to give or not, please continue to keep me in your thoughts and hopes and prayers.
Much love,
Renee Hope Badenoch
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| My dad is home. We stayed up together talking about his trip and listening to Gleam II by the Avett Brothers, and telling each other every three minutes that, "I'm going to go to bed now." But we stayed, lingering in each others presence. We had these strange, short conversations, where we'd start to talk deeply of things--Of love and sorrow and poverty and education--and then we'd stop short, saying, "We'll talk tomorrow." I wanted to show him some essays I'd written while he was gone, and he wanted to show me pictures of his trip, but we said, "I'll see them in the morning, when we're both wide awake." I wonder if we will talk tomorrow, or if we'll wait.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XybDZ9I9k4k | | |
| I think most of my oddities are fairly transparent, especially to those who know me. This meme will be an easy way out of blogging for me tonight.
1. I have never seen the movie "Aliens," but I do know that at one part an egg hatches in a persons stomach, and an alien eats them out from the inside. Ever since I learned this piece of information, I started periodically drawing monsters on my stomach, and I'll walk around the house pretending that I'm being eaten from the inside out.
2. I have an inexplicable attraction to guys who ride bikes. I can't explain it, but every time a biker rides past me, my heart flutters a little.
3. I also am incredibly attracted to guys who wear collared shirts. When there are people who I'm not normally attracted to who wear collared shirts, I find myself blushing and smiling at them.
4. Sometimes I imagine intricate hit-lines in my mind. Like for those bicycle riding, collared shirts fellows I might say, "You and I should ride tandem together, just to spurn the big oil companies. And then we should plant a garden in our yard, and I wouldn't even mind ironing your button-down shirts." Or once when I was waiting for the bus I was talking to this guy and I said, "What are you reading?" "Nichtze," he said. "Well that's kind of pointless, isn't it?" Like, that was my funny "Nichtze is a nihilist" pick-up line, but I guess the guy didn't really agree that Nichtze is a nihilist, or he didn't think the joke was funny, because we are not married. But that's just one example.
5. I have several pairs of "glass-lesses", or empty glasses frames that I wear.
6. I like to call mustaches "lip sweaters" and I also periodically make myself false mustaches.
7. I compulsively wave at people, and frequently start up conversations with people. I also remember people that I randomly meet, and I'll run into them later and say something like, "I remember you, we talked outside of a bathroom stall when I took my SATs two years ago," and a strange look will cross their face, and they'll say, "Oh yes. That's weird that you remember me." "Oh I do," I say, smiling.
8. I named my bike Ender, partly after the indomitable Ender from Orson Scott Card's books, and partly because he's the "Ender of races."
9. I also talk to my bike when I ride, saying things like, "You must be careful to steer around that broken glass," "I hope you weren't hurt when that branch fell," "Just a little longer up this hill," and, "Let's go bike next to that guy in the plaid shirt."
10. The fifty-year old Vietnamese janitor at Forest Park Community College had a crush on me, and would hide in the Janitor's closet until I walked by, whereupon he would jump out and yell, "Wenay! I miss you!"
11. When I was in highschool, I was convinced that my hormonal feelings were unique only to myself. I never said that I had a crush on someone, because those words felt coarse and not defining of the deep things I really felt. I said that I had "Tender Inclinations" toward someone, or an "Emotional Attachment."
12. I have had over fifteen different rabbits in my life, not counting the seven I had summer 2007. In my career of having rabbits, I have had four named Peter, a Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, Benjamin, Odysseus and Penelope. I have also had one rabbit that was bigger than a cat, probably clocking at about twelve pounds, and was also an Albino.
13. I wear clothes I find in dumpsters. I always am far too giddy about it, and sometimes tell people who do not think it is cool.
14. When I was little, I tried to learn French, German and Italian by listening to language tapes. I have forgotten all my French except "Je M'appel Renee" which I will repeat over and over with a big smile when talking to French people. I never really learned German, except one song, that translated declares, "I don't like lemonade, I don't like coke-a-cola, I don't like Strawberry Ice cream. I like nothing but Pizza!"
15. I decided before hand that I would not mention either my brief infatuation with Soren Kierkegaard, or the fact that I cried at the end of Rambo, but I'm not sure what else is unusual about me.
16. Oooh! Once there was a boy who I had a sort of befuddled, awkward "emotional attachment" to, and I wrote a poem about his ears. The poem did, at one point, use the phrase, "seashell pink mango blood juice."
17. I was once cast in a play as "Man with a beard"
18. I make up songs during the day that are heard by no-one except my family. Most of the time they are silly, like, I'll sing, "Oh dear, oh dear, I need some more oatmeal up in here! Everybody raise the roof! What? What? What? Won't someone give this girl some oatmeal?"
19. I used to pretend that all of my fingers had different personalities, and that my left hand was systematically oppressed by my right hand, but my thumbs still fell in love across the class divide. For a while, the right hand kept the two apart, but the two thumbs' love was so strong, it eventually united the hands together. I also pretended that my toes were my fingers country cousins.
20. When I was four, my best friend, Laurel, moved away to Czechoslovakia. I made up an imaginary friend by the same name, and we would have to fight my imaginary enemies, a wealthy couple who dressed in furs, kissed constantly, and hated orphans.
21. I once had a cactus named Herman. I carried him around with me, and introduced him to people. He eventually died from neglect.
22. I used to tell people that when I grew up I was going to be "Either a farmer or a movie-star." That was when I was like fourteen years old.
23. I like washing dishes, it's a soothing, almost spiritual ritual for me.
24. I once had a friend steal one of my socks and tell me they weren't going to return it until I wrote them a letter. They nailed the sock to their door, and when my promised letter didn't come, took photographs of my sock being tortured.
25. I like to draw pictures of red-headed female pirates. I think I started doing it because my red-head friend Abi is somewhat piratical herself, but now I just do it all the time.
26. I'm only going to tag people I mentioned in the note. Tagging 25 other people seems silly to me.
-Renee wrote this. | | |
| I have a cat. At least for now; my family and I are trying half-heartedly to give him away. I got the cat about three months ago. My friend rescued him from a house in East St. Louis, and he was the epitome of pitiful and foul-- The fur from the front half of his body was missing, and his dirty white skin hung loosely off his angular jutting bones. He was covered in fleas, that crawled out of his ears, nose and eyes, and his belly had a strange, bulbous swelling whenever he ate.
Now, he is plump and hairy and full of all the proverbial curiosity of a cat. I find myself liking him more and more as each day passes, and feeling a little embarrassed when I catch myself speaking to him in high, babyish voices,and even more odiously, sentimentally dubbing him with food nick-names. When I come home, I give him kisses and simper to him, "How's my little muffin today? How's my sweet corn-cake? Did you miss me?" When I realize what I'm saying, I drop him, horrified. "Good God," I say, "Did I really just ask if he missed me?"
Still, the cat is certainly meritorious of such affection. When I go to sleep, he jumps onto my bed and curls himself against the curvature of my body- I feel him drape lazily over my neck, coil tightly against the backs of my knees, or delicately rest his chin on my ankles. When I wake up at night, I love to see his dark figure blurry and indistinguishable from the edges of the shadows. During the day, the sun lights the tips of his fur, making him seem like a hallowed figure, and as he churns and shifts in his sleep, I watch his chest bones ripple like small waves. Watching him, I'm full of wander, and a rush of love.
-Renee
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| I've been wanting to write, but I haven't known what to write about. I write all the time--in class I write letters or scrawl poems in my margins, as I walk down the hallways of school I describe my surroundings ("The sunlight from the windows falls across the linoleum floors in clean, linear squares. As I step through the boxes of light, I look down at my folds of the my skirt, and watch their shadows lengthen..."), and when I walk to school I compose essays in my head. When I play with the kids at school, I tell them stories about Princesses and Jedis, brave warriors and dark castles where vampires lurk. However, all of these writings are brief and temporary, I rarely write them down and they eventually just lose themselves in the recesses of my mind.
It makes me think of the Wilco song "Late Greats," where Jeff Tweedy sings, "The best songs will never get sung, the best laughs never leave your lungs..."
Meh. This isn't really what I was planning to write, but it's what ended up coming out. So.
-Renee Wrote This | | |
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