It takes a Village

Thanks to everyone who prayed for the Sky's the Limit field trip today. Our kids made the 1.5 mile trek with energy to spare! More importantly, no one was lost, injured or otherwise imperiled. That is your prayers at work.

After splashing a little in the Rose Garden fountain our kids divided into teams for a fact-finding mission through each exhibit of the Aerospace museum. They launched gliders with different shaped wings to see which flew farther, sat in the cockpit of a police helicopter and learned that a monkey had once gone into space. I think everyone had a great time and went a little deeper in understanding how flight works.

One thing that struck me today was how easily the kids have formed friendships and how different it is for us grownups. A young girl approached me at the museum today and announced, "I'm your neighbor." I recognized her as one of three sisters who live across the street from our house. But to my shame I could not remember her name and have only rarely interacted with her parents. I watched two boys playing ball and learned that their families live in the same fourplex apartment building. But because of friction between their parents over pets and other housekeeping issues they rarely, if ever, play together at home. I introduced myself to the sister and auntie of a girl in Jordan's class. I found out that they had lived just a few doors down from the apartment that Richard and I rented when we were first married. They knew our landlord, but somehow our own paths had never intersected.

So that brings me to our prayer request for today:
Adventures Ahead tutoring has never been just about academics. A primary goal is always to bring families together into mutually supportive relationships. In a big city it is so easy to live without any connection with your neighbors. We enfold our children in virtual villages of hand-picked friends and relatives that meet our needs for community. But how much richer is an old-fashioned lawn-to-lawn, curb-to-curb, cup of flour borrowing network of neighbors? We believe this can be built here, even across the urban faultlines of race, class, country of origin, generation, language, religious practice and whatever things each of us does that bug others of us. Our neighbor Walter called at 8am this morning to warn us that our car was on the wrong side of the street (a $50 ticket on streetcleaning day.) Would he call in a few years to warn us if Jordan was cutting school, driving recklessly or hanging out with a crowd he shouldn't be? I hope the answer is "yes", not just in this one case but among many of the thirty-some families who have joined the "urban village" that Adventures Ahead hopes to become. Pray with us that this will be so!