What is Beautiful Tension?

What is Beautiful Tension?

A Home for the Homeless

Beautiful Tension is a place and a space of refuge and restoration for those experiencing homelessness. In particular this community aims to walk alongside individuals who are in destitute situations. These are individuals who have no known family, limited family, and/or no extended relational networks. It is a home that seeks to extend kinship to persons who have no readily available connections to family, friends, love ones, networks or socio-relational resources.

This community seeks to be a place of transformation for all who are involved. Beautiful Tension seeks to create homes, not houses. A house provides essential but minimal needs. A home, however, attends to holistic needs- especially needs and wants that are intangible. Providing housing to people experiencing homelessness attends to one dynamic of persons being. In this construct a person’s sense of wellbeing is relegated only to the physical realm. However, wholeness occurs at every dimension of persons being. This would include a persons, physical, emotional, psychological, mental, social, and spiritual being.

Our home is a place where we grow together, share life together, and encourage each other to be all that God has intended us to be. Our home is place of safety. Our home is place for people to live as their true selves, having their identity revealed by God. Home is a place to be alive. Our home is not intrinsically tied to the physical residence that we live in but rather it is found in the relationships we have with God and with each other.

Beautiful Tension also serves as a place of refuge to marginalized people. These are people who have been rejected by their families and society as well as ostrasized by the Church. The primary objective is to walk alongside people who are in destitute situations and are expereincing homelessness. Nevertheless, we lend ourselves to be a home for those who are homeless in the sense that they have no place in society and the church. These are people cut from main streams life due to their handicaps, weaknesses, sexual-orientation, skin color, gender, age, social status, and the like.

Why is this community called Beautiful Tension?

Our commuity is named Beautiful Tension because it describes the angst that each person has experienced and is experiencing in our home, in their own lives, in our surrounding community, and in our world.  Beautiful Tension is a realization that following Jesus means following Him into a mileu that is filled with both great joy and great pain. It is to embrace the messiness that one faces in trusting God for everything. It is believing that all good things come from Him and we are best benefitted in life when we fully dependant upon Him.

It is a place and space that allows people to:

1. Experience following Jesus
2. Inquire and seek the ways and teachings of Jesus
3. And/or share spirituality of varied backgrounds without the baggage of polarization.

It is a place and space to share life others with the full purview that life is multilayered. We live in a society and culture is that very polarized. We live uncomfortably comfortable in a world of either and either (said with different stresses of sound). Either we are democrat or republican. We are either rich or poor. We are either for abortion or against it. We are either for same sex marriage or against. We never like to embrace the tension of living in both or embrace others with different thinking. We think it easier to subscribe to one position and make that bane of our existence.

In Beautiful Tension we understand that there are complexities in living our lives. But we make Jesus and His ways of living our one and only focus. We understand that the possibility of two states of thinking or being can happen at the same time. It is the idea the while we are moving toward greater degrees of transformation, we are also moving towards greater degrees of messiness. The more you grow and love, the more you realize how helpless and incapable you are on your own. We have made a commitment to Jesus and allow Holy Spirit to guide us on our collective journey.