Tonight my dear friend Kim invited me to have dinner with her and this little inner city family she has been sharing life with for a few months and it was such a sweet time of community. Robbin, the mom, cooked us lasagna and it was evident how much she loved cooking for people. I cant count the number of times she told me she was a third generation cook and all about how she learned from her mom and her dad and never will share her cooking secrets with anyone. The greatest moment though was when I was in the kitchen with Shanda, this 6 year old toothpick sized ball of fire, and I am sitting on their kitchen floor and she is doing my hair and were listening to michael jackson on their boom box and she is singing every single word to the song while she brushes my hair.
I felt so cared for.
And I thought to myself, if this is inner city ministry, I am in love.
 Not until we are cared for do we see how incapable we are of caring for these beautiful communities and how unbelievably capable our Lord is. Service is life, not ministry or mission or payback or obligation or feel-good or anything else, my dear friend emily shared with me. Its enjoying a meal I would normally not come anywhere close to eating because I have to learn that it is not always about me and my personal preferences but enjoying life the way other people enjoy it just for a night and appreciating the way they want to care for me. And realizing I am blessed by their presence and brought into their home by their graciousness. I am the blessed one. It takes being in that role to see how in a lot of ways its more "satisfying" to be the blesser.

I've been thinking a lot about investing in people and how I tend to withhold my investment and spread it into a lot of different things because the thought of investing everything in one person and them never really caring much or still rejecting the cross would suck. Judas...Jesus washed his feet. The night he turned him in. Jesus knew all along what Judas would do. Yet he invested everything. Knowing, he could have given his spot away from someone else. But he didnt.