It’s been a good day, but par for the course, I am up too late, and feel I am too tired to write a sensible post.  But I tend to feel like that anytime I try to write a post on here, so why is that new.

I thought I would just highlight the main things that were on my mind today.

With Breaking Bad mania reaching a fevered pitch around the world as the show enters its final sprint toward the finish line, I came across an article this morning that was called “Walter White’s Home Town” written by Rachel Syme for New Yorker magazine.  As an Albuquerquean, Rachel tries to give non-New Mexicans a fairer idea of what this city and state, are like- which is not much different than how the show portrays us to the rest of the country.  She does a good job, though, filling in some gaps about our home here.  The skies over Albuquerque are vivid blue, and the poverty and drug problems here are real. But there are also some very good and smart people here too.

After work tonight, I went with a friend from church, Paul Chavez, to take in an Isotopes baseball game.  The night was lovely- there was hardly a breeze felt all night but the temperature was very comfortable and we endured a brief sprinkle in the early innings.  The ‘Topes lost, but there is something relaxing and fulfilling to me about being at a ballpark.  Maybe it has something to do with just being able to talk about life with a friend.  Maybe it has something to do with being able to razz former major leaguer and Cub Ian Stewart within because his Twitter rant all but helped him remove himself from the Chicago club. Maybe it has to do with watching players hit bullets thrown at them into the dark sky and hearing organ outbursts and smelling popcorn and mustard all around the park.  It’s baseball.  It’s fun.

Albuquerque is home to a hit TV show and a hip minor league team.  It is also home to Burqueños, who are simply natives of Albuquerque (though I seem to lack the cultural cache needed to be one since, although I was born here, I didn’t know what one was until just last year).  The term has gained popularity as a name for locals in part because the city was first founded by Spanish colonizers, and that title is accented with Hispanic flair.

I bring Burqueño up not only because it is a term I have been hearing more of recently (thank you, Breaking Bad), but also because the people who seem most to embrace it- those who are largely Hispanic and from the Central corridor and the South Valley- have a large presence in the church I attend.  Many of them deal with poverty, family brokenness, and violence at levels I cannot imagine, and those that visit our campus wonder what we offer them that makes Sagebrush Highland unique.

My question then becomes: How do you reach these people as a campus if your campus is not like the rest of the Sagebrush campuses?

It’s a question that needs to be discussed here more later, but at core, Sagebrush Highland is a frontier church.  It does not sit in the middle-class by-ways as the other campuses seem to, catering to nuclear families with midwestern American roots.  It is a campus in the now “International Zone”, formerly known as “the War Zone”, that hosts people from a range of Latin, Asian, Indian and Indonesian backgrounds.  It meets near a major intersection with the one of the highest homeless and addict and prostitute concentrations in the city. It is in a very challenging area.  Baptisms come with changed hearts and changed lives that are touched and transformed by Jesus’ gospel. We’re still trying to figure out how, at Sagebrush Highland, to understand and to help the those in the Highland and Nob Hill areas that come visit us- many of whom know what life in Walter White’s dark world is like, and who, if steps could be found, would like to climb out of it.