Serve by Design

Prayer on our home driveway. Extended conversations about family, health and life issues. Connecting, affirming, and showing loving concern for neighbors. This is a brief list of things I have recently undertaken in the front yard of our house. You could call them “front yard encounters.” Have you noticed how most front yards are relationally underutilized?   I realize this may be a misperception. There are some houses that have beautiful, wrap-around porches extending from the front door area. Many of these have porch swings and big wood rocking chairs that make a relaxing setting for home owners to look out to the street and the surrounding neighborhood. Beth's Turquoise Table Granbury, Texas Yet, in too many instances, we tend to retreat to the backyard to host our connecting events. It is here in this often out-of-sight setting that we have cookouts, swim parties and gatherings on the patio or deck. It is true that we have to mow the grass and tend to the flowers and shrubs at ...

  Logo Credit: purepng.com Could the little town of Nokomis, Illinois, population 2126, be classified as a food desert? It may be soon if their only grocery store is shuttered. Although community leaders have lobbied Kroger, the Cincinnati-based national grocer, to reconsider, the plan is to close the store at the end of January. My heart goes out to these people. My mother was born and grew up in Nokomis. Over the years, I have enjoyed many visits with relatives living there. This closure is problematic because many of the community residents are senior adults who cannot drive the 15-30 miles to nearby groceries stores in Pana, Hillsboro or Vandalia. Meals on Wheels America research notes that 9.7 million seniors face varying degrees of food insecurity. I fear that many of these older adults live in rural communities like Nokomis. They are going to be left without their neighborhood grocers that were a familiar sight during my childhood years.  These small grocery stores dott...

It always helps me to try to quantify or graphically measure what I'm thinking about. I guess this is because I am a visual person and need to diagram, conceptualize, or even try to sketch the thoughts I'm thinking in order to understand them. The other day in a small group setting, we were discussing how to grow in our capacity to love others, especially those who are different from us. I suggested that we first needed to identify the recipients of that love. Taking a marker in hand, I began drawing on the whiteboard several concentric circles like the ripples made from a pebble dropped into a body of water and then titled this simple image, "Quantifying Our Relationships!" Each circle became a way to specifically show the levels of our relationships in life. The inner core represented ourselves. Then going outward, we segmented other relations like our immediate family, relatives, close friends, next door neighbors, fellow workers, the many acquaintances we have...