In Shalom Sistas, Moore shares what she learned when she challenged herself to study peace in the Bible for forty days. Taking readers through the twelve points of the Shalom Sistas’ Manifesto, Moore experiments with practices of everyday peacemaking and invites readers to do the same. From dropping “love bombs” on a family vacation, to talking to the coach who called her son the n-word, to spreading shalom with a Swiffer, Moore offers bold steps for crossing lines between black and white, suburban and urban, rich and poor.
What if a bunch of Jesus-following women catch a vision of a vibrant, whole, flourishing world? What happens when Shalom Sistas unite?
Free downloadable study guide available here.
In Shalom Sistas, Moore shares what she learned when she challenged herself to study peace in the Bible for forty days. Taking readers through the twelve points of the Shalom Sistas’ Manifesto, Moore experiments with practices of everyday peacemaking and invites readers to do the same. From dropping “love bombs” on a family vacation, to talking to the coach who called her son the n-word, to spreading shalom with a Swiffer, Moore offers bold steps for crossing lines between black and white, suburban and urban, rich and poor.
What if a bunch of Jesus-following women catch a vision of a vibrant, whole, flourishing world? What happens when Shalom Sistas unite?
Free downloadable study guide available here.
Shalom Sistas: Living Wholeheartedly in a Brokenhearted World
246
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Overview
In Shalom Sistas, Moore shares what she learned when she challenged herself to study peace in the Bible for forty days. Taking readers through the twelve points of the Shalom Sistas’ Manifesto, Moore experiments with practices of everyday peacemaking and invites readers to do the same. From dropping “love bombs” on a family vacation, to talking to the coach who called her son the n-word, to spreading shalom with a Swiffer, Moore offers bold steps for crossing lines between black and white, suburban and urban, rich and poor.
What if a bunch of Jesus-following women catch a vision of a vibrant, whole, flourishing world? What happens when Shalom Sistas unite?
Free downloadable study guide available here.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781513801490 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | MennoMedia |
| Publication date: | 10/03/2017 |
| Pages: | 246 |
| Sales rank: | 507,420 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Shalom Sistas
Living Wholeheartedly in a Brokenhearted World
By Osheta Moore
Herald Press
Copyright © 2017 Herald PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5138-0151-3
CHAPTER 1
Not Your Typical Peacemaker
I see love rising like a hurricane.
— Michael Gungor
Kevin called today," my husband whispered in the dark. I couldn't see T. C.'s face, so I propped myself up on my pillow and moved closer to him, careful not to squish the toddler and unborn baby between us.
It was one week after we had evacuated from New Orleans, and all four of us were sharing a queen bed in my godparents' home in Texas. The evacuation had been mandatory. We wouldn't have left the city we loved had it not been for forecasters' promise that the storm was to be a Category 5 hurricane. We almost hadn't even listened to the mayor's speech, in which he predicted that if the hurricane hit the city, it would be devastating.
But I was eight months pregnant, and that had made all the difference. Hurricanes tend to down power lines leaving those poor souls who stayed behind without air conditioning and refrigeration — this is a pregnant woman's nightmare. When we realized this, I told T. C. that for the sake of sanity and our marriage, it was best that we evacuate right quick and in a hurry.
We thought we were going to have a short visit with my godparents in Texas, return to New Orleans and sweep up some debris, and then get back to our very busy, very meaningful lives. We were urban missionaries in Hollygrove, an under-resourced neighborhood of New Orleans known for its gang violence. T. C. served as a literacy tutor in a local school and taught job skills to kids at a community center. As an ex-gang member, he was passionate about giving the guys a way to earn money that used their, um, sales experience for something positive. When I wasn't a pregnant, waddling, klutzy danger to myself and my unborn child, I put my years of training and college studies in ballet to work at the community center. I taught dance for young girls at the center, and since we all had to eat anyway, I occasionally hosted Sunday dinners at our apartment.
We were a young family seeking the peace of our city, with degrees in urban ministry to back it up. It was all very sexy, sensational, and incarnational urban core development.
Bless our hearts. We weren't expecting to lose everything in the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. We weren't expecting all of it to come crashing down.
* * *
Now, for the first time since Hurricane Katrina had made landfall, T. C. wanted to talk. Like most married couples with little kids, we were having this life-changing conversation in bed late at night. T. C. didn't turn to look at me, which was a bad sign. It meant he couldn't process both the bad news and my reaction simultaneously, so he trained his gaze on the ceiling.
The light from the hall did solemn things to his face as he told me about his phone call with Kevin, our landlord and the director of the community center where we worked. Kids from our neighborhood had had to be rescued from their rooftops. The center had been would need extensive repair.
My brain transformed the sounds into words, but my heart could not comprehend their meaning. The ordeal was wearing on T. C. too, I could tell; a five o'clock shadow replaced his well-kept chinstrap beard. He swallowed and reached for my hand.
"Babes," I whispered, not wanting to ask the question. "What about our apartment?"
"Property owners were let back into the city to inspect the damage. The building took water up to the second floor, so our apartment is flooded." He paused. "Most of our things are useless now. They're either water damaged or smashed up."
I watched his lips move. Our building flooded? Most of our things destroyed?
"We need to figure out what we're going to do next," T. C. said. "We don't have a home in New Orleans to go to anymore."
Our two-year-old son stirred, and T. C. dropped a kiss on his forehead. "And until the center raises money for the rebuild, they can't pay staff anymore. So ..." he trailedoff.
"So you don't have a job anymore," I said completing his thought for him.
All of it was gone. Our life as urban peacemakers was ravaged by the storm.
He nodded and returned his gaze to the ceiling. "Tomorrow, Kevin wants me to email a list of things we lost in the storm. He's going to see if he can get us some help replacing them from donors."
Not knowing what to do with all my sadness and fear, I got up to start the list of things we lost. Even though I hadn't slept a full night since the evacuation, T. C. didn't stop me. He knew my Type A personality needed to wrangle chaos into bullet point lists and tidy little boxes.
I sat down at the computer in the dark and went to a website for evacuees, sponsored by an insurance company, and began to fill out the form. "Enter below the items you lost in the natural disaster," the website instructed in big blue letters.
Furniture: All of it. A two-bedroom apartment's worth. Everything. Beds, our new dining room table, which I had saved up for months to buy! My husband's man chair. Our son's big-boy bed. All of it.
Clothing: We evacuated a storm with only a day's notice! We only took three days' worth of clothes for a toddler, a grown man, and a very pregnant woman. Wouldn't you? I guess in a couple of months I'll need post-pregnancy clothes, because by the grace of God, I will have this baby.
Appliances: Well ... everything. You think Hurricane Katrina was mindful that our landlord just bought that dishwasher? Nope.
For fifteen minutes, I filled out each field with a list of things we lost in the storm and a just a tiny bit of snark. (Lord, bless and keep the poor agent who was on the other end of that web form.)
When I was finished, I submitted it and printed a copy for myself. Reading it over, I realized there was really no need for all that sass. Everything could, in fact, be replaced, except for a few gifts and art pieces we loved.
Though, the thing I was most saddened to lose was an artistic rendering of our family's life verse. The verse, Jeremiah 29:7, was on book pages that I made myself without the help of Pinterest, thank you very much. It read: "Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."
I had made the sign years earlier, after attending a lecture on God's heart for the city in preparation to enter urban ministry. I was struck by the speaker's love for community development and his explanation of a word that was new to me.
"Shalom," the speaker had said, "is what Jeremiah is invoking when he tells us to seek the peace of our cities. It is a picture of justice and wholeness for a broken city. In this verse, God is calling every one of us to be peacemakers for our city. Seek its shalom!"
As he introduced this biblical concept to us, I was relieved. Jesus' teaching on peacemakers had always rubbed me the wrong way, but the way this speaker taught us about shalom was refreshing — so much so that it began to shape both my ministry philosophy as an urban missionary and my picture of what it means to be apeacemaker.
In case you couldn't tell from my penchant to criticize dumb forms as I fill them out, I am not your typical peacemaker. Peacemaker has always been a problematic word for me. I don't want to be limited to peacemakers' eternal sweetness and quiet passivity. No, I want to be able to speak sarcasm fluently and to flip over a few tables in holy anger without the fear of Jesus giving me the divine side-eye for my misbehavior.
Also, I love Jesus, but I snark a little.
I'm usually not afraid of conflict, and ever since I saw Janet Jackson on MTV, I made it my life's mission to master the sassy head wobble in her "What Have You Done for Me Lately" music video. She is my patron saint of Don't Mess with Me, the fortifier of every woman who is not afraid of her sass. This was way before Beyoncé took to the stage, mind you. So please, before we go any further in this book: know that I'm not your typical peacemaker. And please, when we meet, ask me to teach you the head wobble. It is everything.
When I talk to my friends about peacemaking, two schools of thought emerge. Peacemaking, for many of us, is either/or. Either you're a peacemaker by disposition: a God-kissed person wearing a perpetual halo; you trade kindness for anger and gentle responses for harsh words. Or you are a peacemaker by occupation: you offer your body as a human shield in a war zone, mediate conflict between two people, or keep a world leader from typing in the nuclear codes. God help you if you don't fall into one of those categories. I guess you'll just have to aspire to a different beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount.
It's clear that I'm not your typical peacemaker by disposition, yet I want to be faithful to Jesus' teaching on peace, so I wholeheartedly threw myself into the occupation of peacemaking as described by the urban ministry pioneer. I was a peacemaker because I was "seeking the shalom" of a community in turmoil. I could harness all my anger and sass for the kingdom. Complete and total score.
If I'm honest, Sista — and I'm going to be honest, because I trust you're not going to start side-eyeing me at the outset of this book — I really loved the thrill of rightness I got as an urban peacemaker. I loved the impressed coos of approval I received when I told people of our work in New Orleans. Calling myself a peacemaker was not a declaration of my allegiance to Christ but an idol of my own making. Of course, it would come crashing down in the tempest of the storm.
Looking over that list of things we lost, my sadness over the ruined Jeremiah sign was deeper than I expected. That sign had become more than a daily inspiration. It had become a source of validation. Having that sign up, meant that when Jesus looked at me, he saw a peacemaker because I did all the right things.
So what qualified me as a peacemaker now that the things I needed to convince me that I was one were submerged under ten feet of water? The one space where I had occupied the clear, heroic role of a peacemaker was gone. Who was I now?
* * *
Several years after the storm I stood at my kitchen sink in Cambridge, Massachusetts, angry with God. It was an evening during Mardi Gras, and a friend in New Orleans had sent me a picture of kids, all with purple, green, and gold face paint. "Wish you were here," the caption read. The kids with big smiling faces were some the kids we had loved and fed around our table just a few years before. The common room decorated with dozens of balloons was where I once taught dance. We used to be the ones who helped at the center's Mardi Gras party. That text was a frustrating reminder that my friend had gone back to seek the peace of the city we loved. I, on the other hand, had given up my peacemaking cred.
Through an unlikely course of events and lots of tear-filled conversations, we decided to move to Boston. Our baby was due in less than a month, so we planned to just stay with my family in Texas. But shortly after we got the news that we lost everything, we got an exciting offer from a school in Boston with an urban ministry campus. We could move to Boston and T. C. could attend Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which both accepted his education grant from his work at the center and offered his ideal degree: a master of arts in urban missions. The seminary verified that it would accept him on short notice after the storm but only if he enrolled immediately. We were desperate for direction and a sense of purpose after the storm, so New England it was. Two weeks after the storm, we packed up our minivan for a massive road trip from Texas to Boston.
Once we got to Boston, we settled in quickly. As Hurricane Katrina evacuees, we were moved to the top of a two-year waiting list for public housing and placed in a comfortable townhome in Cambridge just ten minutes from Harvard University. Because of our evacuee status, we were offered a subsidy, so for the first six months we only paid a hundred dollars a month for a three-bedroom, one-bath townhome in a public housing development. It's amazing what doors nationwide news coverage of a hurricane can open for you.
With every year that passed, it became clear we were not moving back to New Orleans. On his way out to class that evening, T. C. had asked me how I felt about staying in Boston after graduation. I'll tell you more about this later in the book, but I experienced postpartum depression after my third pregnancy — a reality that forced T. C. to eat the elephant of seminary one bite at a time. Six years after the storm, he was still working on his degree. I told him that I loved Boston, I really did, but I felt that I was only a mom. I worried that I had no purpose other than to bundle up the kids, perfect an apple pie recipe, shovel our elderly neighbor's walk, and wash dishes. I wasn't an urban missionary or a peacemaker for my city anymore. I was simply me, and that sure wasn't enough.
I knew T. C. wanted to stay in Boston, and I did too. I just wanted to know what to do with all my love for the city and hopes for its wholeness when I was nestled in a little suburb in Cambridge.
My husband left and another hurricane with another mandatory evacuation was coming, Sista. This time a hurricane of love, God's love was rising like a storm to force me to take a new way. You see, Hurricane Katrina forced me into a season of exile from the thing that defined me. Standing at the sink, I admitted to myself that I just wanted to go back to Egypt, where I was at least fed with my self-satisfaction and good works.
But God knew shalom was waiting in the wilderness.
* * *
The problem with starting out as a peacemaker in such a sensational manner is that when you have to figure out how to dial back, nothing measures up. I was so desperate for the same ministry I had in New Orleans that I reached out to new friends in Boston who were doing the very things we had done in New Orleans: incarnational living, entrepreneurship classes, and mentoring. I asked them for advice about how I could reinvent my urban peacemaking missionary life here, in this new place.
They suggested partnering with their nonprofit, which did similar work in Boston, and I said, "Of course! Just let me know what you need!" ... and then found out that we were pregnant again. Two months after having our evacuation baby. Two pregnancies within the same calendar year. Which meant I wouldn't be partnering with anything but Huggies and leggings for the next two years at least.
When mentors back in New Orleans invited us to give to groups committed to rebuilding the city, we sat down and looked at our budget. There was a reason we depended on subsidized housing and food stamps while my husband balanced work and seminary. Even with that help, we could barely make ends meet in a city that regularly makes the "highest cost of living" top ten list. Quite simply, we could not afford to give anything above our monthly tithes to our local church.
So that night at my kitchen sink I deeply missed my urban peacemaking life in New Orleans. I wondered how to translate my work as a peacemaker to our new city with our expanding brood. My husband was at class, and I was home with three kids — now ages nine, six, and five — praying angry prayers. I caught sight of my reflection in the kitchen window and saw traces of Cheetos dust on my forehead from my snack binge after a particularly stressful bedtime routine. I knew this is not a good look when one is taking on God with an existential rant. But hell hath no fury like a woman who receives a text that inspires a tremendous fear of missing out.
"I'm so over this, God," I muttered through gritted teeth while washing plastic dinner plates. I thought of my friends who had gone back to the city to help clean up and build houses for our neighbors and felt ashamed for not womaning-up and returning to the city with my baby strapped to my back and my toddler with a child-sized shovel inhand.
"I'm over feeling 'less than,'" I continued into the suds. "I'm over not knowing what to do with all this passion for peace and justice and no practical ways to live it out. Like. Over. It. Why would you give me a desire to work for peace and then take away all opportunities to do it?"
Later that night, T. C. came home and told me that he knew what he was giving up for Lent. The forty-day season directly after Ash Wednesday, Lent is a time of letting go of something good in order to lay hold of something that is better. Thanks to conversations with some Dietrich Bonhoeffer–loving seminary friends of his, T. C. had decided to give up Facebook for the next forty days. He wanted to see what would happen if he stepped away from the groups that defined him as a theologian so that he could grab hold of his true identity as a child of God.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shalom Sistas by Osheta Moore. Copyright © 2017 Herald Press. Excerpted by permission of Herald Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword Sarah Bessey 13
Part I Shalom After the Storm
1 Not Your Typical Peacemaker 19
2 Forty Days of Peace 35
3 The Shalom Sista Manifesto 47
Part II Mom With God
4 Dance, Baby: We Are Invited 61
5 Woo-Woo Church: We Are Beloved 75
6 Coffee Shop Alias: We Are Enough 87
Part III Shalom Within Ourselves
7 This Brown Skin: We Will See the Beauty 103
8 Treat Yo Self? We Will Rest 117
9 A Strange Song: We Will Choose Subversive Joy 129
Part IV Shalom In Our Relationships
10 Carpool Tribute: We Will Tell Better Stories 143
11 Shalom with a Swiffer: We Will Serve before We Speak 155
12 Jesus' Party Planners: We Will Build Bridges, Not Walls 167
Part V Shalom in Our World
13 Love Bombs: We Will Choose Ordinary Acts of Peace 183
14 Lemonade: We Will Show Up, Say Something, and Be Still 195
15 Kingdom Strong: We Will Be Peacemakers, Not Peacekeepers 207
Epilogue 219
Shalom Steps 223
Shalom Recipes 231
Acknowledgments 237
Notes 239
The Author 245