{"id":3670,"date":"2011-09-06T00:00:30","date_gmt":"2011-09-06T00:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.brethren.org\/news\/?p=3670"},"modified":"2018-11-03T20:54:07","modified_gmt":"2018-11-03T20:54:07","slug":"its-not-easy-being-a-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/news\/2011\/its-not-easy-being-a-tree\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Not Easy Being a Tree Planted by the Water"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford<\/small>
Tuesday’s keynote speaker for NOAC 2011, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, shared his life story and his faith story — one that has taken him from roots in rural North Carolina, to places like Iraq where he served with Christian Peacemaker Teams, and back to Durham, N.C. He advocates stability as a gift from God, like the tree planted by the river of the water of life.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s not easy being a tree planted by the water, but if you\u2019re willing to stay in one spot, there\u2019s no telling what sort of fruit you\u2019ll bear. That\u2019s what Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove got around to saying by the end of his keynote speech Tuesday morning at National Older Adult Conference (NOAC). Along the way he took\u00a0his audience\u00a0on a startling journey, from a bombed out crater in Baghdad, past the doors to Death Row, through the creation of an intentional Christian\u00a0community in a difficult neighborhood in Durham, N.C.<\/p>\n

Wilson-Hartgrove\u00a0told how he grew up in a small town near Mt. Airy, N.C.,\u00a0best known as the birth place of Andy Griffith. His Baptist upbringing including Bible memorization and eventually attendance at a Jesus Boot Camp. As a teen he went on a mission trip to Zimbabwe. But it was as a young adult, working as a journalist for a\u00a0religiously based\u00a0news organization as the US drew closer to the second Gulf War, that he began to question some basic assumptions.<\/p>\n

He and his wife accepted an invitation to travel with Christian Peacemaker Teams to Iraq in the final days before \u201cShock and Awe\u201d began. Two days before the fall of Baghdad, they were expelled by the Iraqi\u00a0government and driven on bomb-cratered roads to the border. One of the three cars that carried their team members\u00a0hit shrapnel and was thrown into a ditch. The parable of the Good Samaritan came to life as locals from the village of Rutba drove them to a doctor, who, despite the fact that US forces had blown his hospital\u00a0out of existence only three days before, stitched up those whose heads had been split open in the car\u00a0crash.\u00a0He realized that\u00a0\u201cGod is using our enemies to show us what God\u2019s love looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n

After reexamining the underpinnings of his life,\u00a0the couple\u00a0formed Rutba house in a neglected part of Durham as a\u00a0“New Monastic”\u00a0community. The families that live there open their doors to the community and work on what\u00a0Wilson-Hartgrove identifies as \u201cthe gift of stability.\u201d\u00a0Noting that along with\u00a0all the good things that have come with technological advancement there has been a notable lack of discernment about what is really working for humanity and the earth, he identified\u00a0\u201ccultural homelessness\u201d\u00a0as a key problem.\u00a0\u201cPeople aren\u2019t sure where they belong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using the story of Jesus crossing over to the country of the Gerasenes, he identified the demoniac as one familiar in our culture–the person\u00a0who gets no rest, but is always on the go. When Jesus healed\u00a0the man, however,\u00a0he was discovered dressed, calm, and seated at Jesus’ feet. Jesus encouraged that stability by discouraging\u00a0the man\u00a0from following him, instead insisting he adopt a stable life at home.<\/p>\n

The Rutba Hospitality House is an attempt to live out the love of Jesus. The gift of stability includes grace and space to deal with internal problems as well as work and prayer creating a balanced rhythm of life that extends love to the surrounding African-American neighborhood, to the neighborhood youth who have been lured into gangs, to those who end up in jail. Eventually the work of the house has extended to civil disobedience to halt the use of the death penalty in the state of North Carolina, Wilson-Hartgrove shared.\u00a0He himself\u00a0has been arrested and held in jail for attempting to block the doors to a state prison on execution day, all the while, he said,\u00a0quietly encouraged by the police who were forced to arrest him.\u00a0It is a continuing story, as Rutba House\u00a0further extends to both sides of the prison wall.<\/p>\n

“The real gift of staying in one place over time is that it makes possible for you to bear fruit that would otherwise be impossible,” he said. He encouraged all to find peace and community, anchored to daily prayer, and alleviated by God’s work.<\/p>\n

— Frank Ramirez is pastor of Everett (Pa.) Church of the Brethren and a member of the NOAC volunteer communications team<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NOAC keynote speaker Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, who spoke on Tuesday morning, Sept. 6, talked to the older adult audience about the benefits of stability in an ever changing world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1259],"wf_post_folders":[],"class_list":["post-3670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-noac"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3670"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3672,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670\/revisions\/3672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3670"},{"taxonomy":"wf_post_folders","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wf_post_folders?post=3670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}