Organic Leaves

SPACE continues to evolve and change and this year is no different. Probably the most symbolic is our - with no better way to describe it - leaf launch. During our first year, we ran with the idea of renting a school bus, driving around the community and raking people's yards - with the hope of attracting attention and having lots of kids be able to serve people that couldn't do that kind of yard work on their own. [For those of you outside the mid-atlantic part of the US, raking up leaves is a pretty big deal in the Fall.] We did this in November of 2004 and 2005 and it was a ton of fun. [And it wasn't my original idea, I picked it up somewhere along the way.]

Last year, we decided to skip it, but I can't remember why. Well, this year we resurrected it, sort of. Instead of a big production with a school bus, we wanted to make it much more organic - with students leading smaller raking teams, serving people they knew needed help and inviting their friends to be a part of it. I wanted to change the emphasis to be on students and having them organize themselves organically. Dependency is also part of the long term view - when you live a missional lifestyle, you aren't depending on a school bus, or anything else, to get you to where you need to go or who to impact.

Much smaller in scale, they raked three homes - two for active duty families serving overseas and one that was kind of random. Smaller in quantity but larger in momentum. Sometimes, the adults are the ones with dependency issues.

Photo: On the front porch. We sort of knew the people that lived there...