Atlanta. Day 7.
This morning I was on my own to make it to MetroMerge. I now run MetroMerge on Mondays and Wednesdays, so I was there all day today. I got a lot of work done, and left for lunch around 12:30. I met a group of kids from the neighborhood outside from “Who Am I?”, a group of teenagers that mentor other teenagers from the community. We talked about their project, and then I explained MetroMerge to them. They were such a great group of kids and seeing things like that go on in a community really encourages me that people are good, and they are wanting to do good things in a tough world. I love seeing the tension between the world and the Kingdom. The Kingdom is already but not yet; but at times we get glimpses of God at work in our world through others.
I worked the rest of the afternoon and then headed down Moreland past Little Five Points and Emory University to pick up some stuff for Jeff at OfficeMax on Briarcliff (yes, I am figuring out my way around finally). When I was pulling out of the executive park, I noticed a man standing on the side of the road with a cardboard sign that simply read, “Homeless + Hungry.” I thought so long about what I should do. I convinced myself that I would go to OfficeMax and get the supplies first, since I was in the turn lane, and I would come back after to pick him up and go get dinner with him. When I came back to look for him after I bought the stuff for Jeff, he was gone.
And this greatly troubled me.
I don’t say any of this to say, “Well, look at me. At least I had good intention, right?” I’m sure that that man holding the sign would tell me that my intention sucks. So I say it to say that I screwed up. I missed an opportunity. I had a chance to connect with another person and let the Kingdom break into both of our lives, and I passed it up. It haunted me the whole way back, and I tried to think about what my next move should be. I decided that it’s this: to stop making excuses and seize every opportunity. My eyes have started to open dramatically this summer to the intense poverty that is happening right under our American noses, and I need to realize the problem and refuse to accept it. Christ worked too hard to change this world for me to let it all go to waste.
I walked to church tonight (I got called “one of those ‘green people’” for it too; it was a looong walk, but it’s a great way to be in the community). The first church that I stopped at was locked (not exactly seeker-friendly..) so I went to another a few blocks down. It was a nice, little African-American church. All of the members were overwhelmingly friendly to me. It was so great to be a part of their community and their discussion. I want to try a few other places, but I really did enjoy being a part of that Bible study and may go back.
Design stuff: Today at the office, I finished the t-shirt sale advertisement for the GiftCardGiver web-site. It deviated from the theme of the Web-site slightly, but followed the theme of some of the organization’s other materials, so Jeff was okay with it. I designed it all in Photoshop. I used a photograph that I took of the product, combined with a stock photo of a wood grain texture. I applied a technique of using a soft, inner shadow on the shirt so as to take away edge-artifacting from where I cut the shirt out of its original photo’s background. I used hand-drawn fonts on the wood grain, and layer masked them and applied the “Soft Light” blending mode to give the words a texture over the wood. The rest of the day was spent drawing concepts for the Flash digital invitation.
