I'll do whatever you need."—Doug EvansTo all those working in the mission field, a statement like Doug's is a dream come true. An unqualified sentence like that is so rarely heard, when he said it, it stopped me in my tracks. For a split second I had to pause as I considered the gift he could be to our work at UNITE INDY.Doug is retired. For more than 40 years he worked as a teacher inside prisons as an employee of the Indiana Department of Correction. With our work to help reentrants find employment, reconnect positively with family, and reduce recidivism, his experience is more valuable than gold. He knows how to relate to incarcerated people. He knows the program. He knows the possibilities and recognizes limitations, and although he loved working with these men, he always felt something important was missing…something we could provide.In his years teaching as an employee of the State, he always felt the need to bring a faith perspec...
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."—Martin Luther King, Jr.Martin Luther King Jr. was not merely eloquent, but with words that emanated from his deep belief in the promises of God, he issued forth words as powerful as cannon blasts, filled with compelling messages of hope that urged others to action.This quote is from his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1964. But only one year earlier he had been arrested and placed in solitary confinement for taking part in the Birmingham Campaign against racial segregation. Alone in a narrow, dark cell, his attorney visited and brought him a newspaper that shocked him. Religious leaders in the area—black religious leaders—had condemned his nonviolent demonstration.Frustrated and weary, he found a pen and began scribbling a response in the margins of the newspaper arti...
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."-Pierre Teilhard de ChardinAbout 100 years ago, a young monk by the name of Pierre Teilhard was suffering from what today we call post traumatic stress disorder. Like most young men in Europe, he had been swept into the butchery of WWI. His job was to gather up the wounded and the remains of fallen soldiers—a job that left him broken. On a leave from the front, he took vows as a monk and became a Jesuit. By the end of the war, the French government was making good on its promise to take ownership of all religious properties. The Jesuits were exiled to Great Britain.Teilhard's life was not a series of ups and downs as much as a series of continuous downs. Before the war, he had studied paleontology, embracing the concept of Darwinian evolution. Now, as a Jesuit, his writings to reconcile religion with Darwin were rejected by the chur...
When you attack poverty you attack racism; when you just attack racism, you're still stuck with poverty."-Greg EnasGreg Enas is no stranger to the effort of improving lives. As a PhD in Biostatistics, he was trained in researching questions in medicine and biology to improve pubic health. His working life is all about turning data into knowledge in his work as a strategic planner.But Greg sees a broader picture when he addresses public health here in Indianapolis. He sees kids who are hungry, mothers who can't pay the rent, and men who need jobs and can't support their families. Poverty affects everything. From the health and well-being of the family to the increase in crime and the overwhelming hopelessness and high unemployment of entire neighborhoods.Racism is an insidious infection that has been around for far too long. Why would we accept that? There may always be haters, but if we attack poverty we can help those who have been mos...
Remember, amateurs built the Ark. Professionals built the Titanic"-Sir Richard NeedhamSir Richard was a Brit, known for his wit, and even though no one really knows now to what he was referring, his quip is a powerful reminder of the great value of a motivated amateur.After years of working with those in our poorest neighborhoods, we are convinced that while racism still exists, the overwhelming divider of people is really poverty. Whatever color our skin, grinding poverty limits our choices, affects our health and education, causes discord in the home, and can promote crime. Poverty affects the whole family, and generational poverty condemns its children.The tremendous poverty in many of Indy's neighborhoods is caused in large part by the very high percentage of formerly-incarcerated people who live there. For those individuals, the chances of getting a job has been slim to nil. In these high-unemployment neighborhoods, the entire area...
Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."-Charles SwindollnRecently, our family took advantage of the long Labor Day weekend to rent a house on the shore of Lake Michigan. We got into a conversation about some of the things I had done, where I had worked, and the inevitable questions, "what happened then?"They say life cannot be understood as you move from day to day, but if you look back over the decades it becomes pretty obvious there was a plan all along—a hand guiding you, even while you made mistakes or found yourself in a bad place. When you reach that point, the words from Romans 8:28 seem to speak directly to you: "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."Me? I am called? I never would have thought so. I could tell you stories! But the day I woke up in intensive care at Munson Medical Center in Travers City, Michigan, with a br...
If you take away religion, you can't hire enough police..."-A Chinese Marxist to Clay ChristiansenClay Christiansen was a Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Forbes called him "one of the most influential business theorists of the last 50 years."He is an unassuming man who stands 6'8" and played college basketball. But this video has made him more broadly famous than any of his intellectual works. As a professor at Harvard he had a student who was a Marxist economist from China finishing a Fulbright scholarship. Christiansen asked him if there was anything surprising about what he had learned in his time in the U.S.Without any hesitation, he said, "Yes, I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy. The reason why democracy works," he said, "is not because the government was designed to oversee what everybody does, but democracy works because most people, most of the time volunta...
If you change the way ?you look at things, the things you look at change"-Wayne DyerWayne Dyer spent his first ten years in an orphanage after his father walked out leaving his mother penniless. Though he'd been tossed away by his father, a man he'd learn to hate, Dyer survived.He became a high school counselor, getting troubled teens to focus on positive thinking and their goals rather than their difficulties. In 1976, Dyer took a few weeks off and wrote his first book on that very subject. Your Erroneous Zones instantly became one of the top-selling books of all time, with over 100-million in print today.Over the years Dyer wrote 40 books and enjoyed all the trappings of success. But, still a gnawing hatred for his father plagued him. Finally, a few years before his death, Dyer visited his father's grave, planning to "get it all out." But standing over the grave, he began to see his run-away dad as a flawed human being who perhaps had...
A house divided against itself, cannot stand."-Abraham LincolnWhat unrest we have suffered this month, as one appalling murder led to more killings, many injuries, millions of hard-earned dollars in property loss and great damage to our neighborhoods, in an explosion of division. Lincoln knew a lot about division, and while his overwhelming concern was to keep the Union together as he freed those enslaved, he knew, for them, it would be a long road to equity. We are still on that road. We are. But while men like Chauvin cannot survive our judgement, to vilify all those who stand between us and violence is as unfair as the death of George Floyd. There must be middle ground. Division and destruction does not lead to progress.Progress is made by people standing together. Consider the conquests of Martin Luther King, Jr. who said nonviolent direct action was not saintly self-sacrifice or high-minded moralizing but a theory of power. Effecti...
Be yourself. Everyone else is ?already taken."-Oscar WildeIn 1854, during the Victorian era, Oscar Wilde was born into an educated family in Dublin. Highly intelligent, he spoke English, French and Greek. He was an artist, poet, playwrite, and a famous wit. But Wilde was also gay. When the father of Wilde's partner had him charged with gross indecency, Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labor in the Galway prison where he suffered miserably from dysentery and malnutrition. Still a young man, he died soon after he was released.We are each as unique as the flowers of the field. We grow from differing seeds and survive the weather of our lives in different ways. We are black, white, Asian, Hispanic, gay, straight, tall, short, thin, and fat. Some of us have had great childhoods, others not so much. Our religious practices are different, as are our understandings of the Great I Am. But at the end of the day, we are all His. No one is les...
