The Darkness Of Our Tent Village Dismantling

REGISTER FOR OUR TENT VILLAGE DISMANTLING EVENT HERE. It is Thursday, January 3 any time between 9am and 5pm.

I want it to be Easter.

While Christmas is my favorite holiday, Easter is, without a doubt, the coolest of all holidays, in my mind.

Easter is what matters. There’s death on Friday. Saturday is this day of quiet. And on Sunday: HE IS RISEN!

You barely have any time to be sad. I mean, we even call it “Good Friday.” It makes my head spin. Resurrection. It’s the greatest story of optimism ever told.

I’m listening to 12 Days of Christmas right now. We have all these sweet, charming Christmas songs. We bring a fluffy green tree into our house and light it up and make it pretty with decorations.

We tie it to the birth of Jesus even though we all know full well he wasn’t born on December 25. No one knows the month he was born or even the year.

The church co-opted the Pagan winter festivals like the Winter Solstice. I’m glad they did. They are all lovely and wonderful. Christianity really needed a winter holiday.

But the fact of the matter is it’s a time of darkness.

Society has thrown away a group of people. A group of people that are just seen as a problem and nuisance. They built a beautiful thing. As Frank Sinatra once said, “I did it my way.”

They were creating a bridge back into society. They were making an on-ramp to re-enter society.

They built a small, secluded village made out of simple tents and tarps because that’s all they could afford. It was meager and simple. But it was theirs. They built it. They organized it. They governed it.

And all the government did was chastise them and ultimately force them to tear down their creation. “You are not living your best life,” they said. They are living “beneath human dignity,” they said.

And then once they forced them to tear down the beautiful little village they created they kicked them on the way out the door by saying how patient they’ve been with them.

It’s just all dark, sad and lacking all empathy or even a tiny bit of interest in why these people decided living in a tent was better than living in a shelter.

No matter how mad it makes them for me to say it: They simply have zero interest or care in their hearts for the homeless. It’s an undeniable fact.

We are already beginning to move people back into the woods. We are trying our best to hide them from violent human predators, thieves and, most importantly, the government. The government hunts them so they can find them and move them on to a new place so they can find them and move them on again and again. It’s like a sick game the government plays with the most desperately poor people of their community.

I want to tell you HE IS RISEN. I want to tell you we have a resurrection coming tomorrow. But we don’t. All we have is darkness.

The powerful throwing the poorest of the poor back into the woods in the coldest time of the year. It’s just darkness. It’s just dark.

But Christmas is important. It sets the table for the inevitable light that is coming. The light is not here today. It won’t be here tomorrow. However, you can be assured of one thing: the light is coming.

We have these celebrations around the darkest time of the year so that we are reminded that the light is coming. The light is guaranteed. You literally can set your watch by it.

That’s the beauty.

In fact, we can only have the light and hope because of the dark.

We had created the light and hope of a homeless-run tent village. And in the darkest time of year the government snuffed it out. They turned out the light. To send the homeless back into the wilderness alone in the dark.

You can’t make up a more symbolic, man-against-man allegory filled with underlying moral and political meaning.

And sadly, I write this to say that the darkness has not yet turned a corner. We must fully destroy the tent village. We must tear down every piece of it so that nothing remains. I’m quite sure the government will come inspect to make sure every piece of it is gone. I face fines and criminal charges if this doesn’t happen.

I’m writing this to ask you to be part of the final dismantling of our homeless tent village. We need your help. Everything must be cleaned up by Friday, January 4.

Seeing things come to an end is sad. But it is also part of life. And it is how life begins anew.

We are going to have an open house event on Thursday, January 3, 2019 from 9am – 5pm. There is much work to do. We will need many hands. If you are interested, you can come any time for as little or as long as you would like.

We will need people to clean up the tent village. But we will also need food and drinks for the day.

So, there will likely be work that needs to be done in-doors as well as outside.

We would LOVE for you to be part of this process.

You can register for the event BY CLICKING HERE.

Today there is darkness. But the light is coming. Fear not. All will be right with the world. Some day.