This season at Awake
original watercolors created for our series by community member Minah Kim
Throughout Lent, the 40 days that lead up to Easter, we’ll examine the images and symbols we use for God, and what images are lodged in our bones we may or may not be aware of but impact how we can receive and be in relationship with God.
Imagining God is about co-creation. Images of God that serve us are alive, have flow, and lead us to embodying love and fullness of life. Embracing life-giving images requires us first to no to images living in us that bring shutdown, fear and constriction.
This Lent, we invite your imagination to run a bit wild…whatever comes as you play with imaging and languaging God is ok! What image for God might welcome and embrace your holy longing to be known, celebrated, accepted, and emboldened to live your fullness into the world, for this season?
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Snapshots of Life at Awake
Sacred Streets
soul care & social artistry
Sacred Streets is our newest expression of neighbor love first dreamed up by Sparrow Carlson, co-founder of Aurora Commons, in 2019, and now held together by a fabric of connection with other local churches along North Aurora Ave in Seattle and wise teachers with lived experience. As we’ve lived life alongside neighbors who sleep outside we’ve found people experiencing homelessness are constantly given a negative answer to really the most important personal questions upon which their mental health depends: Who am I? What am I? We, as a society, as neighbors, as a church and as kin, must ascribe to the people we are attempting to “serve” the same kinds of complexities, nuances, kindnesses and curiosity that we ascribe and acknowledge within ourselves.
We also grieve the state of the soul of our community, hardened by false divisions of “housed” and “unhoused”, treated mental illness and untreated mental illness, socially acceptable addictions and taboo addictions. Our unhoused neighbors feel the distance and often disdain on a daily basis. So we educate and invite our housed neighbors to be curious about our neighbors on the street and trust that the slow work of bridging across otherness will draw all of us toward a collective flourishing.
Below are examples of current offerings:
Workshops
So often our understanding of homelessness is shaped not by the lived experience of those living on the street or the knowledge of those working on the ground level, but by our social reality that often sees poverty as a moral failing. All of us who exist within our society are affected by collective narratives such as this. Our goal is to offer a better narrative; to tell a better story. Together we’ll lean into the reality of why people experience poverty and homelessness, along with the barriers that hinder the necessary and important work of coming alongside our neighbors with compassion and accompaniment. Workshops happen twice a year through Sacred Streets, and we’re also available to come to your church or organization and tailor the content to your unique context. For workshop inquiries contact: info@oursacredstreets.com
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Circles of Care
The journey to secure housing is laborious and complex. Once people do, a host of other challenges arise: some people haven’t lived inside in years, walls can feel claustrophobic, and folks become isolated from a community that often feels like family. Circles of Care is an invitation to the broader community to be equipped and mobilized towards filling gaps of care for our unhoused neighbors. Volunteers will engage in a process of deep learning and listening as they prepare to accompany a neighbor who is transitioning off of life on the street. (Volunteers are asked to make a six month commitment to relationship with a neighbor transitioning out of homelessness.)
Our hope for our newly housed neighbor is a friendship that supports them in a significant, challenging, and easily overlooked transition. Our hope for our volunteers is a friendship that invites an appreciation of difference and new perspectives. For more information or to get involved, email Hayden: hayden@awakechurch.org.