Neighbors Lunch Update

Our Neighbors Lunch on Saturday was a tremendous success. Thanks to all of you who sponsored and prayed for our experience. We enjoyed a spaghetti lunch at Spaghetti Warehouse in Downtown and cultivated relationships with our new friends: Wesley, Darrel, Cindy, Lowell, Chad and Marjorie.

After lunch we helped Lowell and Cindy move some of their stuff into storage space near Downtown, and we also assisted Darrel in getting a monthly DART pass for July so that he could get around—he sells papers Downtown. I’m delighted the way our service to them emerged naturally out of mutual friendship.

Chad Matthews said it well in an email to me:

Looking up and down the table this afternoon, I keep thinking how RIGHT everything about the situation felt. “Bingo!” I kept saying to myself…. I believe with all my heart that our meal this afternoon was as close to “church” as I’ve been in a long, long time.

Chad and Marjorie have just left for an 8 month tour of major U.S. cities as a way of exploring what’s being done on behalf of the homeless in our country. I’d encourage you to check out their website: www.ILoveEvelyn.org.

This is just the beginning. We’re continuing to dream of ways we can go deeper into building relationships with our new friends and neighbors. I’d like to see us host a similar event on a much larger scale and partner with other organizations in the area to do it.

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We’ve hired Scott Ellis, current President of the Dallas Junior Chamber of Commerce, to do some web design for us. He is responsible for the new DJCC website and we’re excited about working with him. He’ll build the site on a publishing platform called WordPress so that we can maintain it ourselves without having to outsource to someone who knows HTML and all that stuff. (That last sentence may have been more than many of you wanted to know.) Civic organizations are good for networking on many levels.

We should have a site up at http://www.storylinecommunity.com later this month. We’ll keep you posted.