Our theme for this issue of The Mural is Language and Cultural Differences. How does the language we speak affect the thoughts we think? What is universal and what is particular to places and peoples?

“Our theme for this Mural issue is leadership. How do we stay humble while exercising power? How do we drive toward goals without running over team members? This is an important theme for us Servant Partners staff. We come to serve our neighborhoods, but we’re often elevated to roles of leadership within them. Is this a temptation to be resisted? A tool to be leveraged?”

My dad died last October. After growing up and starting his pastoral career in Los Angeles, California, the pastorate had taken our family north for ten-year segments in small-town Northern California, then Oregon, then Washington. But in his final years, he and mom had moved back to retire in LA; he always seemed to think that was where the action was.

I would be hard-pressed to imagine a better illustration of gentrification than white-washing a mural of local cultural heroes to make things comfortable for rich relocators. But the examples of Chavez and Villa surely encourage the locals to resist. Neighbors have rallied and agitated, and leaders have talked to the new owner. So far, the mural is untouched. We’ll see how long it remains.

My real education began when my formal education ended. My living room bookshelves embody my devotion to God’s calling and his rescue of me from aimless academia. I love God with my all my mind because he first loved my mind. This quarter’s Mural looks at school and education. How does God use our environment to develop us? We hope these pieces help you reflect on how God has, and continues to, educate you.

The theme of this issue of The Mural is Crossing Borders: migration, movement, boundaries, and how they affect us. For both us Servant Partners staff and the neighbors we live with, this theme names an important experience.

We are all “humans of” somewhere, but what does it mean to call ourselves human? My favorite answer is that we are angels who . . . excrete. We are not literally angels, but we are like angels—spiritual beings with tremendous capacities for insight, communication, beauty, beneath only the divine in our elegant complexity.

The pieces in this issue of The Mural explore the contradictions and intersections of our lives. Cities are places where everything bumps into and piles onto everything else—places of wild contradictions and dramatic intersections. We’re all hoping to resolve them as positively as Cesar Chavez did. We hope these works help you in that direction.

My home’s physical presence on my block expresses my commitment and connection to the people of this place, my rootedness here. I invite them into my home, into my self, because I want my identity to include them. This issue of The Mural centers on this theme. Home and hospitality stretch from personal to national in these pieces.

“Beauty will save the world.” A mural like “La América Tropical” shows how this can be true, how beauty can be world-saving, or at least world-blessing.