https://instagram.com/p/5YuYCJH07J/?taken-by=moplychurch Hello everyone! Today’s blog post comes to you courtesy of Andi Dickmeyer, the Mount Olivet Mission Intern. I have been working since November to reach out to our youth and teens to find better ways of maintaining communication and community as they grow up through the church. I’ve also been responsible for organizing volunteer opportunities, helping with our equivalent of a Prayer Tour for Minneapolis, advocating for change at the Capital, and helping to sort our Senior High Mission Trip students into their work groups and planning different parts of the schedule and guidelines.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how important is to be conscious about what you’re thinking, feeling, and doing versus being ignorant of society or why you’re thinking and feeling they way you do, essentially being asleep. Being awake vs. asleep to our minds. This concept is especially important here, in Denver, when we’re witnessing and experiencing countless things that must be reflected upon and analyzed.
As I was sitting on the sidewalk yesterday with my group, talking to Jack the homeless Veteran, I watched every single person walk by with either a look of bafflement or disgust or ignore us completely. Only one person walking by smiled and stopped to chat, one of the security guards at a nearby building that has known Jack for months. What is wrong with society that the mere concept of sitting and talking and treating someone on the street like a normal human being (Yes, they are humans!) is either surprising, disturbing, or completely irrevelevant?
A song popped into my head during that time, Car Radio by Twenty One Pilots. “And it’s faith and it’s sleep, we need to pick one please because faith is to be awake and to be awake is for us to think and for us to think is to be alive…” Walking blindly through life, ignorant of the wrongs of society, ignorant of our own minds, is not living. It is us being asleep. Wake up, folks. Question everything. Why do we treat people like this? What are the pros and cons of this solution? What needs a solution? Is there anything we can do? If there isn’t anything we can do, how do I accept it? What can I do? How do I make the world a better place? How do I live?
Wake up.
-Andi