Matt and I spoke at Saddleback’s young adult meeting a couple weeks ago. Here’s a link to our talk. Matt is amazingly witty.

Friends,
I woke up this morning to cooler air, low fog outside and dew on the yard. It’s cooling down here. The fires are getting under more containment. People are starting to go home and beginning to clean up. The long hard work now begins.

The drop point we’ve been working with has settled down quite a bit. We drew a lot of attention to things and I believe that helped. Thanks for your help.

Brooke, the kids and I will be out of town for a few days. Point Loma professor, Jamie Gates and some students have agreed to keep bringing meals to the drop point until it closes this weekend. Your presence there is still needed to help collect donations as well as being a watchful eye.

For now, I will not be sending out as many emails as I have. We will be back in a few days and will update things then.

Again, thanks for you donations, assistance, publicity and prayers.

Friends,
As many of you know, many of us in our community have been feeding the volunteers collecting donations at the Chicano Park donation drop point.

Yesterday, our group of primarily gringos experienced some resistance to serving the primarily Latino volunteers. We came to find out that earlier in the day, they were harassed by the Minutemen and some people came to take away donations, which the volunteers at this station allowed. Why did this happen? Because this drop point is trying help undocumented, non-English speaking people as well as others directly effected by the fires.

Because of this, the volunteers were hesitant to trust. Were we spying, trying to hurt them somehow? We talked with the organizers and some of the tension was relieved. Trust can be hard to come by sometimes.

This morning, Brooke, my kids and others from our community went to the donation drop point again. Our group was delivering breakfast to the volunteers. Four police cars arrived aggressively questioning the intent of the people working this drop point. It was an ugly scene. Seeing only kindness and generosity expressed by these volunteers, my children drove away now afraid of the police because of how they treated the volunteers.

I was planning on sending out a hopeful note this morning. I wanted to share with you about how beautiful it has been to see San Diego’s often divided groups come together and work together peacefully in such a dark hour. But instead I feel I need to get the word out on this.

This is not the time to put citizenship or skin color over humanity. Some of you may not agree with my ‘political leanings’ and that is okay. I will be honest with you, this is not political for me. I don’t want to sound pious, I say this with the utmost sincerity, I am compelled to stand with these people because I am a follower of Jesus.

Please get out the word about this. If you are in the area, go to Chicano Park and use your presence to provide protection to these people. Yes, I am asking you to trust me that the intentions of this group are for good. You are going to hear otherwise. Be prepared. But please act, pray and publicize this.

As a last note, SD IndyMedia may be the best place to find out about this stuff.

Some people got wind of us organizing meals for the volunteers collecting donations at Chicano Park and donated some money to help. I’ve uploaded some photos that Matt Gonzalez took so they could get a glimpse of where their money went. You can take a look at them here.

“Limbaugh has apparently been talking about this, and, predictably, Matt Drudge is wallowing in it, too: the comparison between the “savage” behavior that prevailed at the Superdome during Katrina and the “civilized” behavior that we’ve seen at Qualcomm here in San Diego during the fires.

First off, you don’t have to be very good at unraveling conservative code to see that the comparison they’re drawing is between black people, the primary affected population at the Superdome, and white people, the majority (though even this point is up for debate) at Qualcomm. The argument seems to be that white people are more civilized and handle emergencies better than blacks.” more

This is a good post and being a local in the midst of this, I think he’s right on.

A couple blogs updating information on the fire:

signonsandiego.com’s wildfire blog

cat dirt sez

san diego: dialed in

As most of you are aware by now, our beloved city is ablaze. The Hawthorn House has already received several calls from folks wanting to make sure we were all okay. The Evans family and the rest of us here are all fine. Our neighborhood is clear of any immediate danger. Thank you for the calls and prayers.

Many people haven’t been as fortunate as we have been and are still in need of help. Simultaneously, there are a lot of people trying to find ways to help but not sure where to go or who to ask or what to do. In response to the many conversations I have had to this nature today, I offer this email list as a way to connect needs to assistance and assistance to needs.

So, if you know of a particular area where people can help, please send an e-mail to ecclesiasd@googlegroups.com and everyone on our list will have access to that information. Likewise, if you have resources of any kind (time, money, food, housing, etc.) that you can offer please email that as well. Most likely, there will only be a few degrees of separation on this list, which will make receiving and giving a little more personal, which is always needed in moments like this.

Thanks for helping get the word out.

Jason
for the Collective