"If I had a hammer..."
- Pete Seeger & Lee Hays
May 24, 2015 - Pentecost Sunday
My father-in-law, Bert Steensma, was always building something.
Don't get confused, Bert wasn't a professional carpenter. However, by the time I married his daughter, Stacey, 20 years ago he had already built a number of successful businesses. Bert and his brother Gary have sold tractors and auto parts, owned a mall, an office building and a service station. Together they were always building their business.
When he retired his stated goal was to help rebuild peoples lives by helping to rebuild the homes of those who had been struck by natural disasters - and he did volunteering with the Christian Reformed Church's Disaster Response Services for years. He also spent time helping our church here in Alaska renovate their new space. He even returned a decade later to repaint the walls he had painted when we opened. In the final year of his life he was busy helping to remodel a small home for a women exiting homelessness. In the midst of cancer treatments and failing health, he worked to build a new home, and a new life, for someone in who was in need of some rebuilding.
Bert's heart for building extended beyond the borders of Michigan or even the USA. I recall a sun soaked day two years ago basking in the warmth with Dad in Talkeetna, AK and listening to him explain to me the work he had helped start in Honduras. He outlined the reasons why they choose to pave peoples floors (health and infant mortality) and why they built water boxes (sanitation). He and I talked about the relational aspects of ministry. I was so blessed to hear his heart about helping those in need, his desire to know them and be known, and to connect with him on a level we didn't often share as we shared a beer.
Bert also built a family. He married Lynda Smedley 48 years ago. Together they have three daughters (something I can relate directly to) and a son, as well as 14 grandchildren. I have had the privilege to be a part of this family for the past two decades and have been blessed by the skilled craftsmanship Bert had as a family man.
An outgoing and gregarious man Bert was always building friendships. Quick to laugh, or make a joke, he was easy company. As a churchman he built the kingdom serving as a leader in the congregations he attended and supporting mission efforts across the world.
Today my father-in-law died, a victim of the lung cancer he so valiantly fought. He breathed his last early Pentecost morning, giving up his Spirit the day we will celebrate the Spirit's arrival.
Today I reflect, not just on a good man, but on building.
Bert's life - a life lived well - is asking me the question "what are you building?"
It is a question that lingers for all of us left in the wake of this wonderful builder.
What exactly am I building in/with my life?
Rest in Peace Dad.
"Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain."
- Psalm 127:1
Berts Obituary Can Be Viewed at:
http://www.zaagman.com/obituaries/obituary-listings?obId=503169#/obituaryInfo
"The skin your in makes choices for ya"
- The Nightwatchman
In recent weeks we have as a nation once again watched rioting in the streets. This time in Baltimore. The May 11, 2015 cover of Time magazine noted that these particular riots brought to mind the riots of 1968 in Baltimore. Flipping through the pages one quote stood out: "We never recovered from the riots of 1968. Our infrastructure was destroyed" (Jack Young, City Council President). But Baltimore wasn't the only city that had riots in 1968 - Washington DC, Louisville, Kansas City, Chicago, Wilmington, and Detroit all suffered riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Detroit had seen much larger riots just a year before, riots that are often seen as the beginning of the end in Detroit. (1) The 1968 riots happened in the year my parents finished High School.
As I was finishing High School in the spring of 1991 the events that would trigger the 1992 Los Angeles riots were beginning to unfold. And now as my daughters are in High School we have seen riots in Ferguson and Baltimore.
It appears to me that we in the US have a roughly 20 year cycle of racially charged riots. That in itself is rather concerning. However, what I find more concerning is the way in which we often think of these riots. Because I don't live in Baltimore or Ferguson or Detroit (though I wear a Tigers cap nearly everyday) it is easy for me to believe that of this unrest and racial tension is happening "over there." It is easy to think that it could never happen in my state, by city, or my neighborhood. As a northerner growing up I always saw the issue of racial tension as a southern thing - not owning up to the legacy of racism that scars the history of my home state of Michigan. Charlie LeDuff notes in Detroit: An American Autopsy, "Michigan may geographically be one of America's most northern states, but spiritually, it is one of its most southern...by the end of the decade (1920's), there were estimates that eighty thousand Klan members were living in Michigan, half of them in Detroit, with other klaverns throughout the state in places like Grand Rapids and Flint." Growing up I heard the racial jokes. When I travel back to Michigan now its easy to see the legacy of its racist past in the way people talk about areas of town where people different than them live or the terms used to describe the stores that have the most diverse clientele. Just a few months ago while driving through Grand Rapids my wife and I noted how the neighborhoods still remain largely segregated. But that is still over there, thousands of miles away from where I live. I can still choose to dismiss that racial tension because its not in my hometown.
Anchorage, Alaska - my home for the past twenty years - boasts the most diverse census tract in the United States (2), the most diverse High School in the country (in fact three of the top ten) (3), and the school system boasts a majority-minority population that speaks 93 different languages. (4) The city is very diverse and the neighborhoods are much more mixed than many cities its size. One of the reasons I love urban Alaska is it's diversity. Yet, here too the tensions along racial lines are real.
When we moved in to our current neighborhood, Dimond Estates Trailer Park, we noted that the boundary lines for the schools seemed very strange. While the park is very close to a Jr. High and a High School - both only a couple miles away - the students in our neighborhood get on buses everyday that takes them 20 minutes away to a different Jr. High and High School. Those kids get off their school supplied transportation having moved from the extreme diversity of the trailer park to nearly all white schools. Daily they transition from a low-income, high-density neighborhood to the most wealthy and desirable part of town. When we inquired one administrator told my wife that this practice was in place because the district didn't want two all white schools. What I have come to learn in the last week is that the reason is far more sinister.
Last week, as I sat in a meeting with leaders from across the city engaged in serving youth at-risk, I over heard a conversation about my neighborhood. The person talking was someone for whom I have a great deal of respect. He has served youth in the city for a very long time and was a respected leader in the school district for decades. After the meeting concluded I asked this acquaintance about the history of my neighborhood that he was speaking about. He shared that a decade ago when the new High School and Jr. High were built - the ones that my daughters and the kids of Dimond Estates are bussed to daily - the lines for the district were redrawn and public comment sought. He continued to explaining that until that time the Dimond Estates youth were being sent to a third set of schools, and were not zoned for the High School and Jr. High that are closest to the trailer park. In the public meetings with the parents of those most proximate schools refused to have the trailer park drawn into their schools zone because they did not want the Alaska Native youth (5) in my neighborhood in their schools. Clearly troubled, he explained that the administrators from the school district present in those meetings said they had never seen such racist and hateful behavior in their lives. In the end the school district re-drew the lines to the configuration used today. So even in Anchorage the rift of racism is not too far below the surface. The story shared with me by my fellow meeting goer was not about a riot on the other side of the continent, or a city on the other side of the state where I grew up, or my old hometown, or even some place across town, but about the neighborhood I live in.
We so often fool ourselves into thinking that the issue of race is over. We trick ourselves into thinking that it is something that happens "over there." We isolate ourselves from the reality of the history that this country carries around largely unacknowledged. But as I reflect on it...it is everywhere...seriously everywhere.
Joel K
(1) = "Detroit has the ignominious distinction of being the only American city to have been occupied by the United States army three times" - Charlie LeDuff Detroit: An American Autopsy pg. 43. It was occupied for riots in 1863, 1943, and 1967. All three riots were race related.
(2) =http://www.adn.com/2013/04/06/2855271/hometown-u-data-show-mountain.html)
http://greenandgold.uaa.alaska.edu/blog/10142/studying_urban_inequality_in_alaska_and_the_us/
(3) = http://www.ktuu.com/news/news/study-calls-east-bartlett-west-americas-most-diverse-high-schools/24725354
(4) = About the Anchorage School District, Anchorage School District, http://asdk12.org/aboutasd/, (accessed 18 June 2014).
(5) = Dimond Estates is a very diverse neighborhood. The singling out of the Alaska Native youth is particularly disturbing.
