A few months back our leadership team was brainstorming ideas to make our community more known in our neighborhood. We decided that we wanted to share love with our neighbors, but were having a hard time striking on an idea that would be both a public invitation to come and see about us as well as a positive act towards our neighbors.
Jeff had just taken down the strand of lights on the porch so that the painters could begin their work. Our porch looked so bare I couldn’t help but notice the two large hooks that our plants had hung from last summer. Those hooks, the conversation we were having, church signs in general, and a recent Portlandia episode all mixed together in my brain and the spirit took all of it and inspiration was born. We decided to get a chalkboard and write positive, hope filled messages to our neighbors. We live on a street where over 16,000 cars pass a day, some of them stopping right in front of our house due to pedestrians using the cross walk or heavy traffic from the bridge construction down the way. Lots of people in a hurry forced to stop. What a wonderful thing we could do here.
So then began weeks of researching chalkboard building and types of chalk. I found an old broken chalkboard behind the door in my office at the traditional church I serve. Not only was it cracked with a hanging bracket missing someone had taken crayon to it at some point. I hauled it home and painted it with blackboard paint. I bought chains and affixed a new bracket to the back. Now came the hardest part, what words to write?
We didn’t want to be cliche or too churchy, so I asked people from our community to submit short uplifting phrases. The first one this past week was We are all walking art from a song of the same name by the band February Birds. It’s been a joy to see people smile as they see the sign. It’s an unusual phrase, it’s beautiful and encouraging. Just the perfect gift of love from us to our neighbors.
As you may recall from the first paragraph we also wanted to invite people to come and see about us, so in conjunction with our hanging blackboard we created a yard sign, inviting people to seek out our community on Facebook. I don’t know what this project will yield, but it already feels good and right to be sharing who we are with the people in this neighborhood.
It’s amazing the way that the Holy Spirit can take the mix of our life experiences and lead us to create something beautiful here and now for our neighbors. This is the walking art that each of us embodies.
-Eilidh
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