We’re sitting in a huge barn, an open kitchen to one side and a coffee service area to the other.
Running down the middle of the barn are three long, sturdy tables. Over to one of the walls, there’s a smattering of white handprints, reaching over each other to form a mountain.
My pastor stands in front of the group with a guitar.
We’re singing “Amazing Grace.” The group is 40% Iranian refugees, 40% reformed prisoners and 20% reformed-conservative-North-Shore-Christians (that’s my category, anyway).
Minutes earlier, we’d been sitting outside on picnic tables, eating fresh pineapple and watermelon, overlooking the 360 degree greenness of fields and flowers and vegetable patches and horses.
A baby sits on the ground watching a dog who’s watching a chicken.
The farm is a community organization, a place where the reformed prisoners come to learn how to farm, build furniture from recycled timber, rehabilitate race-horses at the end of their careers, as well as enjoy community with each other.
I’m sitting in this service, reflecting on a handful of frustrations in my personal life. Replaying conversations, events. Work run-ins. Sydney traffic.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / that saved a wretch like me.
One of the guys who had been in prison gets up and tells that after praying every day, he had seen his two sons for the first time in three years the day before.
My chains are gone, I’ve been set free.
That morning I had read a meditation by Richard… [Read more…] about Cracked Humanity
