“Your kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven.” -Jesus, Matthew 6:10
A story from Awake’s Andy Carlson:
Awake’s mission is driven in part by the notion that bearing witness to the Kingdom of God means bearing witness to an alternative reality, to another world. So to be a part of Awake means to participate with a community of believers in a style of life rooted in the reality of the Kingdom of God rather than any kingdom of this world. This involves an alternative way of seeing our neighborhood, an alternative way of hoping for healing and redemption, an alternative way of stewarding resources, and an alternative way of being in relationship.
Our hope in creating the Aurora Commons has been that the world inside those four walls would become a tangible resemblance to the presence of the Kingdom of God. And the other day, while our neighbor Russell stood waiting outside the door to the Commons, he said something peculiar that gave me a subtle indication the space might indeed be fulfilling some of those hopes…
Now Russell has achieved the status that people in our neighborhood occasionally confer as “old timer.” He’s going on two decades of hanging out in this little corner of the world. Russell is kind of an icon, too. I can usually find him standing in his place on the back stairway of the AA meeting hall like someone manning a fire tower, scanning the neighborhood, his neighborhood, from that elevated vantage point and waiting for something of interest to arise. “I’ve seen it all,” Russell often says in a slow baritone voice; and I believe him.
So I can partly comprehend his skepticism over the past few years as Russell has been analytically observing the emergence of our faith community. I remember being flat out ignored by him at first, having “hellos” met with silence and waves returned with not even a nod. And then I remember his apathy becoming more like disgust as he would mock our efforts to unearth the goodness of the place. I’ve heard it said that hatred is closer to love than indifference, though, and it seems to me that Russell has lately been coming to love the presence of Awake in his neighborhood because he’s become a regular participant and volunteer in the life of the Commons. Recently he even told a few of us that his perception of the Church as a whole has been significantly reshaped by Awake’s style of life in this place.
Last week when I was standing on the inside of the Commons’ locked front door and Russell was standing outside waiting for me, a jesting look came over his Fu Manchued face and he shouted, “Let me out!”