This past Sunday, our church gave away $160, 000… to the congregation.

No, it’s not a church growth strategy or a scam or a shell game. And we didn’t do it because we have an excess of resources (in fact, we are behind $50K on our current budget).

Still, it wasn’t given recklessly (though I’m sure some will see it that way).

Yesterday our church gave each member and regular attender a check for $500. It felt crazy. Scarey. Stupid. Bold. And faithful.

Back in the mid-70’s our church played a role in establishing a housing development that had plenty of set-asides for people of color and others of limited means. Called Atrium Village, it was the first mixed race/mixed income development built with private, public, and church resources in the nation. Last year, the restrictive covenants expired, and the developer wanted to sell. The involved churches sold their interest, but not before negotiating new restrictions on future development, resulting in even more affordable housing units on that site.

Earlier this summer, LaSalle Street Church received a check for our share of the sale: $1.6 million dollars. More money than we’ve ever had at one time in one place.

Our first act was to give 10% of the money away. But where? To what? An Ebola clinic in Sierra Leone? A fistula center in Niger? An art project in our own inner-city neighborhood?

We decided to take the boldest leap of faith any one of us could imagine: We were going to give it to the people and let them determine what to do with the money. Each of us would get a portion of the 10% and then… it would go wherever each person wanted.

Freely. Without any strings attached.

Gulp. Holy $*% were we “wasting” $160, 000 dollars? Maybe.

How do we know it won’t be “squandered”? We don’t.

But we know this: every day we wake to gifts we never sought, expected or earned. This morning, we were greeted with an astonishing blue sky and a houseful of people who love us far better than we deserve. We’ve seen ‘unforgivable’ actions forgiven, and we worship a Jesus who loved us, even while we were still his enemies.

This is the essence of faith I think–not just that we believe in God, but that God believes in us. And trusts us to do great things with his gifts.

Is grace wasted on us? Definitely. Sometimes.

Sometimes the wealthy forget that before we worked, we were given the tools to work with.

But then there are those other times…those times when we remember. That all grace comes from a Giver who asks only that we respond by doing what he does, acting as he acts, giving as he gives.

This time we remembered. And we gave. #loveletgo

I pray we learn to be that free every day of our lives.

My life was changed nine years ago when the jeep I was traveling in pulled up in front of a cow dung home and a lean, shy 16 year old boy walked over and extended his hand to me. Two younger siblings peeked around the hut’s door frame.

Both parents had died of AIDS. Ramal was the breadwinner in the family. He was tending a small garden plot, caring for a few chickens, and with the support of an aid agency was learning how to repair car engines.

This was a family of dignity and strength. A family that was taking some of the worst life can throw and staying committed to their faith and to one another.

Oh I was so proud of him! Even now looking at his picture, I remember the quiet power of this young man. Someone had told him he was important. Someone had stood by him and his sisters while his dad died and his mother finally wasted away too.

Related: On World Vision, Gay Marriage, and taking a stand on the backs of starving children

That somebody was World Vision. And oh, was I proud of them. Ramal was a Muslim – a legacy of his dead father. But what was keeping that family together was a Christian agency who didn’t check his religious affiliation when they learned about his status as an “orphan headed household”. They knew that the embrace of God was huge, that Jesus would have made a beeline for Ramal’s door, no questions asked; and that they wanted to be where Jesus would be.

Since that trip in 2005, I have had the honor of sponsoring several children with World Vision. Our congregation has built school classrooms, drilled water wells and trained rural pastors. In less than 6 weeks another group will be departing to distribute backpacks, and learn about new arenas of how we can share the love of Jesus with a suffering world.

On Monday, when I first learned about World Vision’s employee policy – allowing all employees to marry – gay and straight — my heart leaped inside me. I thought this agency might show a fractured US church a direction to a deeper unity.  I appreciate how doctrine must be central in churches, but surely, in an agency devoted to all of humanity, surely, the mission would keep “the main thing, the main thing.”

World Vision could show us how we all: gay, straights, divorced, single and married – – could recover our mantle as people of the way.

That’s not to be.  There will be no leadership to a deeper unity. Instead there are just deeper fissures and more hurt.

Also by Laura: Philip Seymour Hoffman. Beautiful, Flawed Humanity.

I’m not going to denounce, condemn and bully. There’s been enough of that these last few days. I’m not pulling my support for my children. I’ll continue to recruit and support the many marathon runners who will endure 26.2 miles in order to bring clean water to people around the world.  And next month our church group – 8 straights, 2 gays and 10 opinions – will arrive in Tanzania where we will greet our brothers and sisters in the Lord.

But I’m sad.  And I’m disappointed.  Because for a moment I thought World Vision was going to show the U.S. church what they showed me that morning at Ramal’s house. I thought we all were going to see a truer picture of just how wide God’s embrace really is. and how important every single person is to Jesus. Every. Single. One. Of. Us.

It makes no sense that I am so upset about the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s not like I live in New York where I might have seen him onstage or caught a glimpse of him around town. And I’m not some sort of film & stage buff who can analyze his many performances and directorial venues.

He’s just another celebrity, I told myself when I heard the news. But he’s not. Or he wasn’t, I should say.

When Hoffman played a character he found something deep and true and powerfully human that others missed. To watch him play Truman Capote is to see the deep isolation and insecurity that lay just under the surface of Capote’s witty words and social bravado. When Hoffman inhabited the charismatic L. Ron Hubbard, I felt the cold wind of religious poppy-cock challenge what and why I believe. And when, as a nurse in the film Magnolia,  Hoffman doggedly stayed on the phone for hours in an effort to reach a dying Jason Robard’s son, we glimpsed the possibility for great kindness that resides in all of us.

Hoffman exuded a restless intelligence that refused to go quietly into that good night. For me, his acting elevated humanity by revealing our magnificence and exposing our hopes and our fierce loyalties and desires. Which makes Hoffman’s death from a heroin overdose particularly pitiful. But I suppose deeply human too.

This is who we are: men and women of inestimable worth. Marked with a dignity and glory of divinity that beams brilliant and true.  This is who we are also: creatures of dust. Pulsating energies of insecurity and fragility. People accustomed to dwelling in “a land of deep darkness”  as the prophet Isaiah wrote.

Yet, “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of just one candle, ” said St. Francis.

Tonight I am going to say a prayer for the too-brief light that was Philip Seymour Hoffman. And I’m going to say a prayer for the lives of all the rest of us who remain, giving thanks for the light that all of us were created to radiate.

And I’ll pray to remember to treat those around me with tenderness and grace. Recognizing that they are just as I am – beautiful and flawed.

More dead people – by a weapon that’s been called “The most wanted gun in America.”

Thirteen are dead following a mass shooting at the Washington (D.C.) Navy Yard. Another twelve are wounded and hospital staff have been told to expect more victims.

More widows, more motherless children, more grief. And once again my sadness is accompanied by outrage that one individual shooter (or in this case perhaps two) can kill so many so quickly.

At least one of the weapons used this morning was the AR15, the same assault weapon used to kill 26 in the Newtown elementary school and 2 at a Portland Mall last December as well as the 12 killed in the Aurora, CO movie theatre last July.

Depending on modifications, an AR-15 can fire at least 30 rounds of bullets in a sustained fashion. The gun is cheap (pre-Newtown, it sold for less than $1K), readily manufactured (at one point “flying off the shelves”) and, until 2004, was banned. Since then the demand continues to climb. A quarter of the buyers are hunters. The rest of them? Well, they are people who say they want to guard their homes and protect their families.

The AR 15 began as a military weapon. Created for people in combat. When did we start believing we need such firepower to guard the family silver?

I’m not so naive to believe we will ever ban guns – I’m not even sure that’s advisable. But military assault style semi-automatics? Weapons that at one point, were banned, and banned without our constitutional rights coming unglued? Surely we can have a real conversation on them. People’s lives are depending on it.

Photo Credit: NPR