Schuler
What We're Up To Next Year
Hello! If you’re here, first of all: we love you. Thanks for being a part of our lives as we journey toward a greater understanding of God and what it means to serve. You may already know we’ve joined Mission Year, an urban ministry in Atlanta, GA, but you probably don’t know precisely what we’re up to.
Here’s a primer:
We’ll be working 25-30 hours a week with a local community service organization (to be decided upon arrival), living in community with a few other married couples, and getting involved in a local neighborhood church. Our main goal is to model Christ by learning how to love ourselves, neighbors and team members fully and passionately. Like the Mission Year motto, “Love God, Love Others, Nothing Else Matters.”
We discovered the program when Mission Year visited John Brown University two years ago. The possibility of doing the program came up this last year when trying to decide what to do after college. After praying about it together as a couple and with others, we felt called to step out in faith. We are excited to have the opportunity to live out the lessons that we’ve been learning these last 4 years of college!
We appreciate your prayers as this will be a challenging, but exciting experience!
Tim & Al
About Mission Year
Mission Year is a year long urban ministry program focused on Christian service and discipleship. We take teams of young people, place them in an area of need, and help them to serve people and create community. We are committed to the command of Jesus to “love God and love people,” by placing the needs of our neighbors first and developing committed disciples of Christ with a heart for the poor. Learn more about our first year program…
Schuler's Blog
When You Drop the Ball Down A Big Fat Well / Apr 27, 01:39 PM
I was doing a resume and it wasn’t any different than any other day. Except that this woman was on time, polite, and well spoken. A lot of our clients are similar, but this woman was different. She highlighted her people skills over and over, talking about how she loved interacting with clients and coworkers and how building relationships was the most important thing for her. She said she was a trustworthy person who cared for others.
When asked about her career goals, she said she wanted to pursue janitorial work—cleaning, housekeeping. She was adamant about it.
So we made her resume.
After she left I realized I’d missed an opportunity to speak into this woman’s life. She had the skills to work with people, and I could tell she wanted to. But she chose to be a janitor. I should’ve told her to explore other options. I should’ve mentioned what I saw in her. The ability to build relationships in a meaningful way. To help people through those relationships.
But I felt intrusive. I thought it wasn’t my business.
It was.
We all need guidance from time to time, a little nudge from people who believe in us. I hope this woman finds it somewhere. Because she didn’t find it in me.
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Post-Posting Disclaimer / Mar 24, 12:58 PM
I feel like I should explain an earlier post before going on with the Drum Class series.
In “In the Confessional” I (Tim) said, “We know how selfish, independent, affluent and bizarre our childhoods were.” I should be clear I’m referring only to myself here. Allison may not feel this way, and certainly not everyone in Mission Year feels this way either.
So let me explain, so that no one has to wonder what I mean by the statement.
“Selfish” – My childhood was a very self-serving one. Though my parents taught me to share my toys with my friends and my brother, and though we were taught against materialism, other mantras (like that we should succeed in all we do, or that we could pursue whatever we wanted) forced into my brother and I a subtle egotism. While it is occasionally masked by other values, I assure you it is there. This is not entirely our parents’ fault. We accepted the teaching of self-over-others (or at least before others) and made it a creed to which we held. We’ve both wrestled with how to rid ourselves of this need to be the best, to always succeed, and constantly affirm ourselves through the repetitious praise of others. This is how my childhood was a selfish one.
“Independent” – The same values that fed our egos also created a path toward individualism, which doesn’t sound so bad until you realize it also creates a heart of brick, a person who has a hard time relating to others because too much interference or dependence will start to hinder our individual needs and wants. Again, not the fault of Mom and Dad. Though of course, like many Americans around the close of the 20th Century, they subscribed, almost necessarily, to the myth of individualism. But most do, and in many ways it isn’t so bad. Our individual autonomy helps us break out from under controlling parents, rescue ourselves from abusive relationships, and have the courage to act on our convictions. But if we stray too far in that direction we become anchored to our ways, our beliefs, our knowledge, our dreams. We resist community wherever it finds us, though it’s what we actively seek.
“Affluent” – The fact is I had two childhoods. One, before certain members of my family struck a very expensive, valuable natural resource beneath their farm in Western Kansas. And the other, after this fact. So in the beginning we didn’t have a lot because we couldn’t. My dad had a steady, well-paying job, but they were frugal and very wise where they spent it, never wanting to spoil my brother and I or themselves. Then, when the checks began coming in (a lot at first, then gradually less and less) we were suddenly able to do a little more. They began fixing up the house; they bought new vehicles, musical instruments and other things for my brother and I. They set aside vast amounts of money for college. They emphasized personal responsibility and living within our means, and my brother and I were hard workers. So we really weren’t spoiled in the American sense of the word. But when you have eyes to see the world as it is, and if you let yourself absorb the information that has been released over the last 30-50 years, then you know the way we grew up put us in the top ten percent of the world economically. I went to college debt free. This is astounding to a lot of folks in the U.S. much less in underdeveloped nations where college is only for the rich and powerful. So I grew up affluent compared to those we should always keep in mind—the poorest of the poor.
“Bizarre” – This statement is really just a sum-up of the first three. Because when you realize, globally, how many children grow up with the privilege I had, I am an oddity. But because we surround ourselves with others like us, and because many of us grow up in one small place, we get used to how our lives are ordered. We get used to our way being normal. Other kids having the same, or similar, experience of childhood. But like I said, I’m grew up in the top ten percent of the world financially. Just because it’s the top we forget that it means it’s a very small minority. Therefore, my childhood was bizarre.
I want reiterate that my parents are not at fault for these things, and the experience was surely not the same for my brother. But this year has brought an increased awareness as to how I was raised, the effect it’s had on me, and why. And I wanted to share it.
Grace & Peace,
Tim
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DRUM CLASS / Mar 13, 10:55 AM
West Side Christian School
Wednesday Afternoon
1
TAYLOR. Young. Maybe 9 years old. She sets her drumsticks down, soundlessly. Back of the room, engulfed in a sea of empty chairs. She cries. Her friend goes to her. I join. What’s wrong? The friend: You remind her of her dad. Cold, scared—thinking Oh shit… oh no… Jesus. Because when a girl cries because of her father, one, tragically, can assume there is a vivid, horrific rendering of past emotional or physical abuse playing through her mind and soul. [Dads are real bastards sometimes.] Giant waves in her eyes. I miss my dad. Over and over. She tells the story. Dad in Alabama. Even when he calls, when he hangs up she misses him all over again. Her hands are wet with tears. First time I’ve seen her without her glasses. I’m not the villain, happy about that, but I am still helpless. Sit. Ask what her dad is like. She perks up. Class ends, she promises to ask her mom if she can call soon. Hope her mom is nice. Hope her mom understands love. Trying to let myself feel it all. Sadness, the loneliness, frustration. I want her father to come back. Come back to Illinois, sir. Alabama is nothing compared to this daughter of yours. Come back.
In the Confessional / Mar 5, 12:42 PM
We’ve been a bit absent, Al and I. We apologize. We’re still in Chicago, 6 months after we began Mission Year, one full year after we decided to do it. And 12 months and $20,000 later (yes, we have only $4,000 to go, woo!), we are faced with a lot of truths, and a lot of experiences, where before we only had unknowns.
We now know that service is hard. That love is a lot different than we’d thought. That race still exists and that being colorblind isn’t only impossible, but it’s not the way to reconcile people to one another. We know how selfish, independent, affluent and bizarre our childhoods were. And how ugly we can be. How forgetful. How apathetic. How narrow-minded and contradictory. Hypocritical.
We know judgment isn’t the way. We know violence isn’t the way. Police force isn’t the way. Nope, neither is religion. Sorry. We’re beginning to really believe in this neighbor stuff. Love your neighbor? Always words to aspire to, but never something real. But now we see that love is the collision of one human being into another, and neither one letting go of the other. Loving the people you live around, and living around those we love is vital. Proximity is necessary for community. And community is what happens when people love each other.
We’ve seen the most bizarre combinations here. There isn’t any reason for Chris to come over and play chess with us. But when we moved to West Garfield, we began doing our laundry at Spin Cycle. And we collided with Chris.
Following this poorly thought-out confession will be a series of moments from Tim’s recent weeks in Chicago. They’re short and simple and really nothing. But they’re everything too. When we step back and allow ourselves to feel these things, when we cease caring so much about whether we’re doing it right and just do it, these moments come out of the woodwork and leave us with nothing but to love where we are, what we’re doing, and who we and all our neighbors are. Love begets love. Just like violence. But nicer. Much, much nicer.
Emerson on War / Feb 25, 04:51 PM
Friends, Readers:
Obviously neither of us have ever been to war, but the condition of where we live is very war-like in ways, not because of the violence but because of the existence of enemy lines. Here we have a demonized enemy and a great force that continually presses against it. There is great evidence of the hatred which fuels war and man’s ability to take another man’s life. In light of this, here are some of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thoughts on the subject, originally published in 1838.
“War,” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It is really a thought that built this portentous war establishment, and a thought shall also melt it away. Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to their moral state, or their state of thought.
“Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day–orthodoxy, anti-masonry, antislavery; see how each of these abstractions has embodied itself in an imposing apparatus in the community; and how timber, brick, lime and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons.
“You shall hear, someday, of a wild fancy which some man has in his brain, or the mischief of secret oaths. Come again one or two years afterwards, and you shall see it has built great houses of solid wood and brick and mortar. You shall see a hundred presses printing a million sheets; you shall see men and horses and wheels made to walk, run and roll for it: this great body of matter thus executing that one man’s wild thought.”
Emerson dares us to dream and to make those wishes vocal. Tell others the world you dream of and perhaps you will ignite in them a similar passion.
With many across the globe realizing that a connection, deeper than we’d originally realized or intended, exists, and that interdependence is now inevitable and, in fact, a global occurrence now, as we speak, we may multiply our dream.
Let us dream in loud voices. And let us come back a few years later to find our dreams fulfilled.
Grace & Peace,
Tim & Al
