Felix, worms, and dice games

Quick update: Felix did no significant damage to the mission sites in Honduras. There was some minor flooding at the sites along the coast, but nothing more critical than that. Thank you for your prayers!

Life is so full lately, and I am grateful! This weekend my housemates and I attended a composting class offered by Denver Recycles and Denver Urban Gardens. Two master composters, who took a 10-week class to earn their titles, ushered us into the nuances of transforming your leftover food, yard refuge, and paper scraps into thick hearty black dirt stockpiled with nutrients. I learned that even dryer lint and coffee filters can be composted! Also, we are currently deciding on whether or not to venture into verma-composting, a fancy name for worm composting. Because with 12 people living together we will most likely have a steady supply of veggie scraps the whole year, and because in winter traditional composting (i.e. heaping leftovers in a pile outside) takes a lot longer due to the colder temperatures, worm composting could be a fine option for us. Basically, we would buy a 'worm box,' about four by two feet and standing waist high, create a bedding out of shredded newspaper, place about a pound of Red Wriggler worms inside, and feed them all of our table scraps. Pretty cool, huh? I've never heard of such of things, but hey, we don't have any pets, so why not? =)

Also this weekend we spent Saturday night at our house with a group called Transitions, who are young adults with developmental disabilities such as Down's syndrome. Together, we ate eight pizzas and played a dice game called LCR - quite fun, very little skill involved, and just enough unpredictability to make it interesting. The 'differentness' of the Transitions members varied from person to person; some spoke with a strong speech impediment, others had distinct facial features, and others acted in ways usually inappropriate for social settings, like reapplying makeup (all of it) during the game. But there was so much more to see beyond the instantly apparent. I talked for a long time with two young men, Danny and Michael, who work together at a grocery store and share both an apartment and a passion for superhero movies. Michael won a joke book during the course of the night and kept us giggling with jokes (For example, "Why did the mummy go on a cruise?" "He needed some time to unwind!")

I imagine that caring for Danny, Michael, and all of the youth there was a challenge for their parents, and perhaps a financial and emotional strain beyond what most parents shoulder. And as far as I understand, pre-natal diagnoses of genetic defects such as Down's syndrome have a very strong correlation with the decision to abort the child. So I was struck, in the midst of tossing dice and chowing down hawaiian pizza, by the courage of the adults that chose to love these children who spoke funny and got their left and right mixed up and would probably never 'succeed' in the common worldly sense of the word. But also I couldn't help but think again of Jesus' surprising image of himself, hidden in the distressing guise of the hungry, thirsty, naked, cold, and (I venture) the disabled. Why does it seem that the more intently one looks at life, the more it seems to be a fairy tale, in this case the kind where the prince is disguised as a frog or beggar? It seems that both courage and imagination are needed to love others well.

To conclude, another awesome outcome of the night was that I won a starbucks card, soon to be put to good use, especially because fall is coming!

Peace to you all.