listening to the concrete jungle

More thoughts on San Fran... About 4 weeks ago I was driving down the road in Pittsburgh and I heard the tail end of an NPR story on a micro-enterprise in San Francisco called La Concina, that is Spanish for the kitchen. It is a micro-enterprise that has an amazing state of the art kitchen that rents it out to help struggling immigrant women get food, catering and restaurant businesses going helping them break out of the cycle of poverty and basic subsistence. While continuing to drive without crashing I jotted down the name of this place. So when I was in San Francisco I could visit it and learn more about and so we could organize a visit for our missional leaders to learn about empower and equipping micro-enterprises. So my new friend Meredith from Mars Hills Graduate School and me after getting lost and walking some 20 blocks in the wrong direction finally located La Concina in San Fran's Mission District. This place is amazing and the woman who runs the kitchen was humbly articulate about the depth of their work. They are empower women from Mexico City, The Yucatan, Cuba, South Africa have a quality kitchen to cook their indigenous food and develop a viable, self sustaining business. So after about an hour of captivating stories we asked her about what other people and places we should visit wile we were here n the Mission District. Her face lit up! She then began to tell us about 6 other places that we could visit that were also empowering others, building community and unbeknownst to themselves doing Kingdom work. I will tell you about some of those other visits in the coming days. But as for this journey God was saying to me, do you have eyes to see and ears to hear me? The Lord of the Universe is at work in the world. As we are driving down the road listening to the radio, as we are walking down the sidewalk, and as we listen to the stories of others even those who may not acknowledge him. He is speaking, he is calling, he is alive, and he is actively seeking to make connections with us. The question is are we able to hear him and see him, cause sometimes, if not most often, he comes in the normal, everyday routine YET in the abnormal and unexpected people and places. Just ask Peter about Cornelius.................