Day One: The Whirlwind

I don't know whose idea this blog was, but it's 11:37 Nashville time and I'm just now sitting down to write something about our day.
We met at the Nashville airport at 5:45 central time by 1:45 Pacific we were on the BART headed downtown. Our time today was spent getting oriented to the Dojo. Here are a few highlights:

** Eating at the best French-Vietnamese restaurant in the country (Tulan) and having some of the other patrons buy our group of 20 dinner. This was especially impressive because it happened after after a conversation where we discussed what we were doing in town. We told them we were here exploring the connections between spirituality, justice and the arts and they were taken by our quest. So taken in fact that they bought us dinner.

You see in a town like San Francisco, spirituality is very popular. People are open and excited about authentic quests that attempt to connect the dots between spirituality and all of our lives. Everything is connected and everything matters. Because this notion is central to Jesus' claims about the good news of the kingdom of God, we felt right at home. However, because San Francisco is a post-Christian kind of town (meaning the forms of institutional and organized church life are not experenced as relevant or helpful) this sort of holistic gospel idea is not one people find in Christianity. We'd like to learn to live in a way that makes the connections obvious again. To that end, there is no better city in the world to encounter in the Jesus Dojo. (If you want to know why we're not talking about it as a mission trip ask me later;)

** After a trip through China town, we sat in Washington Square and unpacked our experience further in the resturant and talked about following Jesus as rabbi.

** Jeffery saw breakdancers today associted with D.A.R.E. He liked it.

** Went to Fishermen's Wharf to see the tourist side of the city. 

** Going to bed after a long day.