Yo, LA.

I gotta say: You are a stunning lady. Truly, a piece of work.

Curves and beaches that slide into Sunset, bright city light lips with neon licks. Stubborn chin, hands on your hips, with skinny jeans and hot street kicks.

You are the hub of culture, music, art, drama, fashion, and film. Props. Totally disproportionate in the influence you have on the rest of the world. Totally disinterested in a world outside your addictions.

I walk down your streets and they’re dirtier than TV says. I stand next to a woman of broken dreams and broken promises, dressing like Marilyn Monroe– wondering if she goes home and cracks open a beer, catches her face in the mirror and asks when Hollywood would give her a break. I watch a Korean ajuma with cracked hands that caressed a lover, son, daughter, sister, rummage through the garbage for bottles for change. An unwashed white woman tucks her knees and entire body in a tattered sweatshirt and raises her big sky blues to me to say eff off, spitting poison at my feet. I look at a black brother that waves a CD in my face with yet another “smash hit” that plays the same beats that we’ve all heard in the same place where Rodney King fell, shots rang, voices raise, and blood ran forgotten. I walk down your dirty, gummed, cracked streets and I hear traffic and conversations, sound and fury, signifying nothing. I walk past these black and whites into the between, into the grey: those with nothing and those with Nothing, the addicted and hopeless, the ignorant and the apathetic, the blind and the mute. I walk into your heart and I find that its broken. And I find that I am among your brokenness because… I am.

Jesus. You are.

You are the Strength in the weakness. You are Love to the broken. You are the Joy in the sadness. You are God of this city, of Los Angeles. And there is still great work to be done here.


12And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. 13Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. 14For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.  Hebrews 13:12-14