justice in real life

sorry about the delay in posts. i've been away with the guys from my house without my laptop the last several days.

i live in a house with 7 other guys. they're all undergrads at Malone College and i bought this house and invited them to move in with me for a year to think about what it means to live intentionally together. there's three main thrusts to the house in my mind: community, leadership, and justice.

one of the things that i've found as i've pursued this is that intentional living requires an awful lot of intentionality. this might seem somewhat obvious, but when you move in with a bunch of guys and you all agreed to intentional community as the precept behind why you joined forces, it's a bit of a surprise to find that it doesn't happen naturally. you have to work for it.

one of the things that we didn't really talk about beforehand with everyone was that justice was going to be a theme. however, justice has been a theme of my life in the past year and, as one giving leadership to the house, it sort of goes with the territory. my apologies to anyone who didn't want to learn about justice.

so we've spent time in Bible studies talking about AIDS and poverty and the environment. not your average Bible study topics, maybe.

they all finished they're exams on thursday and so we got away for a few days to a house up on Lake Erie and holed up and played video games and ate junk food and generally were lazy. it was great. but on Friday night i pulled us all together to talk for awhile...to take a gander at where we were, where we'd come, and where we wanted to go.

i won't go into all the details, because this isn't the time or place, but it was an intensely good conversation. challenging, thoughtful, provocative, encouraging. all of these things. we spent a lot of time talking about ways that we had failed each other and the house. and thinking about how we could lift each other up more effectively.

and in some ways, this was the most effective "justice" conversation we've had all semester. because justice in theory isn't really justice at all. to sit around and talk about justice is fine, but it's not full. it's interesting that micah 6:8, the ultimate justice verse in the Bible, says "act justly," right? and so in this conversation we had, we enacted justice toward each other. we righted wrongs and we established (or began to establish) paths that will lead us in walking in righteousness with each other. only time will tell the fullness of this just living we began a conversation about. but it at least is a trailhead to the path.

what are the ways that you pursue justice in your life in untraditional paths?