There are lots of sayings about beginnings and endings. Leadership guru, Dr. Stephen R. Covey, in his famous book Seven Habits for Highly Effective People encouraged folks to “begin with the end in mind”.

When the idea for Just Love in Greater New Orleans was still just that…an idea…we posed this statment as a question. We asked, “what is the end we hope for?” Being a part of the Christian Church/Disciples of Christ, who are a group of people who strive to be a “movement for wholeness in a fragmented world”, the answer came pretty quick: to bring healing and wholeness to the people of Greater New Orleans. Now that we had our end, we had our beginning, and we had our guiding statement. “We exist to Just Love Our Neighbors body, mind, and soul so their lives will experience healing and wholeness.”

Mary Shelley. the author of the classic book Frankenstien wrote, “every thing must have a beginning … and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.” This is true for Just Love in Greater New Orleans. We exist because the folks at First Christian Church - Greater New Orleans, through much prayer and discernment, decided to take all their assests and give them away to efforts that will continue their long history of “bringing healing and wholeness to a framented world” in new and innovative ways. One of those efforts is Just Love - Greater New Orleans.

This is a picture of just SOME of the folks that made this bold and selfless decision. When I think about this group, a quote from Winston Churchill comes to mind when he once said, “this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” If Jesus taught us anything, it’s that nothing ever really ends, it only transforms. Our hope is that the transformation of FCC - Greater New Orleans will lead to even greater transformations of healing and wholeness in the lives of the folks Just Love - Greater New Orleans serves and care for.

Grace and Peace,

Sam

The city of New Orleans is a very unique place, inhabited by very unique people.  It is a place known for Mardi Gras, the French Quarter, and our beloved Saints.  It is known as the birth place for all types of music, food, and entertainment.  Folks travel from all over the world to see what “The Big Easy” is all about.

What many outside of New Orleans aren’t aware of, and all of us who call it home know all to well, is that there are many here that can’t just “laissez les bon temps rouler!”  Food insecurity, lack affordable housing , and educational inequality, just to name a few, are BIG issues in the New Orleans that make life for many no where near EASY.

That is why the Just Love Your Neighbor movement, born on the Northshore of New Orleans, has been listening to and learning how we can Just Love our New Orleans Neighbors for the past several months.  With your help, we are ready to show the people of New Orleans how the power of selfless love WILL change our city...and the world.

Our mission is to Just Love Our Neighbors’ body, mind, and soul so their lives will experience healing and wholeness.   To bring wholeness to a person, we need to care for the whole person.  We all have been so stressed it made us physically sick or witnessed such beauty it felt like a spiritual experience.  Those feelings and experiences demonstrate the mind-body-soul connection.  A holistic approach to well-being involves bringing these three aspects of the self into balance to create harmony and health.  The mind, body, and soul conception is a way of understanding ourselves as "whole people."  On our website is a brief explanation of each.  In the future newsletters, we will share future opportunities to Just Love Our Neighbors, as well as how that love has brought healing and wholeness to them and the world around them.

Being a pastor in the Christian tradition and a hospice chaplain caring for folks from any (or no) spiritual tradition, I tend to see how God, Jesus, the Divine, the Universe interacts in our lives.  I’m not convinced of many things, but I am convinced of this.  I do really believe that the power of selfless love WILL and HAS changed the world.  I’ve seen it personally too many times to ignore it.  I would love nothing more than to show you, and the beautiful folks of New Orleans, how it WILL and HAS.

Grace and Peace,

Sam