This video is made up of many clips that I have taken since the start of 2022. They all depict, in different ways, where I’ve met and seen God these past few months. I find God in nature, my relationships with people, traveling and art.
Graduation Poem (for 倩倩)
written by a sunflower
who knows nothing
of integrity, only how to face
a storm when it comes.
Curriculum Vitae
My real education began when my formal education ended. My living room bookshelves embody my devotion to God’s calling and his rescue of me from aimless academia. I love God with my all my mind because he first loved my mind. This quarter’s Mural looks at school and education. How does God use our environment to develop us? We hope these pieces help you reflect on how God has, and continues to, educate you.
Movement, Migration and Black History
"For my ancestors, bodily movement was a way to exhibit our freedom, to speak out against the oppressive boundaries set by race, class, and gender. From the early days of the Black American Church, dance and movement has been a part of the experience.”
Home For Now
When I wake up in a city That yesterday was strange Today I can imagine That I might have place Amidst the bustling crowds, Strange sites and foreign sounds With the help of google maps I begin to find my way around
A LA ORILLA DEL MAR
ENTRE VOCES QUE CANTAN EN MEDIO DEL SONIDO DEL MAR. CADA CUAL DE DIFERENTE LUGAR. UNIENDO SUS VOCES EN LA VERDADERA FELICIDAD. UNIENDO SUS VOCES EN LA VERDADERA FELICIDAD.
The Promised Land
(CHS>MFE) // Could it be that the immigrant narrative is a physical reminder of the saved sojourner's story—people of an upside down kingdom?
My Respectable Papa
To parallel my grandfather, I chose to take a picture of my brother. There is a generational gap between them, and thanks to my grandfather's work my brother will never have to be a laborer unless he chooses to be.
Crossing Borders
The theme of this issue of The Mural is Crossing Borders: migration, movement, boundaries, and how they affect us. For both us Servant Partners staff and the neighbors we live with, this theme names an important experience.
What You Don’t See
If you drive through my neighborhood, it might look like any other. But you don’t see… The exhausted mother sleeping on the floor of an unfurnished single rented room working two full-time jobs, desperate to provide for her children in a way she was unable to back home in Mexico.
The Slow Burn
Beeswax is ideal for making candles. It is hardy, smells sweet, and is known to burn the slowest and longest of any other wax candle. Sometimes discipleship is like making candles from beeswax: it takes time, patience, and a strong fire to bring people to a place of peaceful surrender. That was the case for Alejandra.
Color de Esperanza
Entre gotas de color y sueños de esperanza, Cada sonrisa y mano extendida, Entre cada amanecer y atardecer, Así es cada uno de ellos, entre sus similitudes y multiculturalidad.
Community Portrait
Sabrina has been experimenting with old-fashioned camera techniques, including these double exposures which superimpose neighbor and neighborhood.
Humans of _______
We are all “humans of” somewhere, but what does it mean to call ourselves human? My favorite answer is that we are angels who . . . excrete. We are not literally angels, but we are like angels—spiritual beings with tremendous capacities for insight, communication, beauty, beneath only the divine in our elegant complexity.
At A Distance
At a distance Everything makes sense The sky is up The earth is down The ocean looks like solid ground From afar Nothing stirs the heart The world is big The creatures small What difference could a person make at all?
Walk Down Sinclair
There is an RV parked on Sinclair Drive, where the road curves in front of a vacant youth center and a middle school, where the sky seems to swoop its blue, swirling wing over the distant foothills. The vehicle, stationed beneath the leafy ropes of a eucalyptus tree, is at once both peculiar and unassuming, with its jutting forehead, densely packed belongings, the metal head of a Texas long-horn hanging from the front grate. And around it the undisturbed aura of a slumbering, ancient beast. On my afternoon walks during the pandemic, taken when the walls of the house began to feel particularly oppressive, I would pace leftwards from my residence, past the blind corner, down the sunny, quiet road.
Making a Place
A feast is laid on the table today, greeting, filling us after long hours, no—years on a way. Where we’ve come from, where we’ve been. Places set around what’s been begun. You call us around. You crouch quite a ways
down to show us how washing feet lowers and lifts up what the law says. Then breaking bitter herbs and grain’s sown sweetness, for days when I groan
Between Los Angeles and Heaven
My son, he’s three, and He wants to go home. To see his teachers, he says. He is speaking, now slowly—I want to go to A-fri-ka—as if we aren’t getting it. To Uganda, he says, eyes insistent, pointing to the sky we will fly across to get back there. He is pointing to where home is, the way some kids point to the sky when asked: Where is heaven?
Intersections & Contradictions
The pieces in this issue of The Mural explore the contradictions and intersections of our lives. Cities are places where everything bumps into and piles onto everything else—places of wild contradictions and dramatic intersections. We’re all hoping to resolve them as positively as Cesar Chavez did. We hope these works help you in that direction.
In the living room
In the living room the balcony door yawns open And evening coolness sweeps in The kid downstairs is smoking again like an acolyte swinging a censer Thick incense fills the room encircling me Suddenly I am aware of holiness in this place In a moment my eyes can see What always was, only gently hidden Love and Presence fill this block hover over it