Chicago...We'll Miss You

When you put millions of people together in one area and allow them to do life together, you get something amply enjoyable and potently terrible.  Chicago is a place of life.  People live, eat, shop, run marathons, get hair cuts, walk across streets, enjoy the lake, open themselves to others, close themselves down, hate, commit crime, debate politics, watch football and hockey, and construct for themselves the Chicago that exists today.

I have spent more than 1/5 of my 25 year old life in Chicago.  In two months Jo and I will be moving away to continue the support raising process for Central Asia.  My heart already grieves for the loss of my friend: this city.  Sure, it's a place that frustrates me from time to time and shakes me around like a rag doll, leaving me at the door step of the apartment entent on simply going to bed.  It is a place of darkness and bondage.  Evil has made it's abode, securely fastened on the rich as well as the poor; they both are beaten down through idolatry.  And the chocolate smell that often goes out across the city from the factory has the 50/50 potential of smelling like chocolate, or like vomit.  Such is the deception of sin!

But, nevertheless, I like it.  God is here.  His love pours out constantly.  

When I arrived in 2004 the city streets seemed vague and dark.  Now, through connecting neighborhoods by means of familiarity, it's become a place of fluid motion.  Cars, people, sounds, and lights often create in me a feeling of exhilaration, as though the city were built upon a great wave of the ocean.  This is all best experienced, of course, in the plain view of a woman greatly loved.  Jo and I have all our beginning memories here in Chicago.  

God's desire for Man to live initiated this amazing life experience.  Indeed, Chicago, we will miss you!  

As humanity creates a culture in this midwestern city, might God break down injustice, establish His peace, and instill in this land the need and Means for Forgiveness.