"At times, the ongoing instability of the inner city threatens to overwhelm the lives and structures of our neighborhood and our work as a church. AIDS, asthma, shootings, inadequate housing, addiction, and unemployment persist, in spite of all the positive changes. One life is transformed and then, another falls apart. Beautiful homes go up, apartments are renovated but so many new homeless families are crowding into the Bronx Emergency Assistance Unit office that many have ended up sleeping right there on the floor. A woman finally gains the strength to move away from an abusive husband, but she must then leave her leadership roles in this church and community too. Her children are baptized, enthusiastic participants in many church activities and then they disappear. A teen leader and mentor to younger children is arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong skin. Another is randomly gunned down. People in recovery enter the workforce for the first time, but the only jobs they find require work on weekends, nights, around the clock in some cases — cleaning homes, washing dishes, tending the homebound. Time for family, community, and church evaporates.

As a pastor I keep wanting to build something stable, solid, and lasting and often seem to be failing. Things progress and then seem to fall back. I've always liked the phrase 'burning patience' quoted by Pablo Neruda when he received the Nobel Prize for literature:

" 'I wish to say to the people of good will, to the workers, to the poets, that the whole future has been expressed in this line by Rimbaud: only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid city which will give light, justice and dignity to all.'

"But sometimes my patience wears thin. What does it mean to be patient when young people you love kill or are killed? What does it mean to be patient when we find ourselves mourning more and more young adults dying of AIDS and seeing their children become orphans? What does it mean to be patient when politicians, businesses, and even fellow Christians write off an entire community? And there is plenty of impatience with my private failures too — feeling constantly torn between family and church responsibilities, never enough time to do anything right, feeling that everything is so fragile and might collapse at any moment. . . . — and it will be my fault as the pastor who should oversee it all — and knowing that such thoughts give far too much importance to myself . . . Lack of perspective, lack of breathing space. 'Things standing shall fall . . .' Does that mean me?

"Sometimes when I'm short of patience, I focus on the little things, which I find myself doing more and more. Today, this teenager is going to college, the first in her family to graduate from high school — 'I can't decide whether I want to be a teacher or a psychiatrist or a pediatrician!' Today, this woman is speaking up for justice — 'I sat at the table of history today, Pastor, instead of just reading about it!' Today, this man is experiencing forgiveness. Today, this child feels cherished in the house of God."