DESTINY...

When Shawn and I sold our house and moved to the Portland neighborhood we did not have any grand master plan to start Love City or honestly do any of the things that we ended up doing over the last seven years. We were just following the spirit, one step at a time. I remember we used to tell people the story of how we moved, and how Love City started, and they would always be so amazed that we had done what we did. For us, though the amazing thing wasn’t us, it was how we got to watch God work every day, bringing together countless details we didn’t even know about so that at the right time, in the right place love happened.

About six months after we moved in and had started Love City, we got a phone call from a high school student looking for a place for their youth group to come do a service project. They had called multiple organizations and had been turned down, there weren’t a lot of places that would accept a group of 70 high school sophomores for a volunteer service day. We, however, were just crazy enough to say yes. It was early days at Love City, and we had the Mackin building which we were just starting to renovate that needed plenty of work. We arranged a date for the group to come, and on April 30, 2016, about 30 of the youth group came down to help paint the ballroom. The leaders of the group were the Essex family, mom and Dad, Nicole and James, older daughter Katelyn and their son Ethan who was in high school and had originally heard about Love City and reached out to coordinate the service day.

Ethan as a teenager helping to prep for the fish fry.

As we walked around the building and explained the vision for Love City, something started to click in the Essex family. We had already started the fish fry as a weekly fundraiser, and they started to come every Friday to help. When our very first spring carnival came around in May of 2016, the Essex were there, helping to run the cotton candy machine and various games. All the while still coming every Friday to help run the fish fry. Around this time, they also adopted Eli from China. He was just 1 year old when they flew to China to get him. They would bring him to the fish fry’s every Friday, with a fold up crib in the back of the kitchen hallway, and he would sleep while we fried fish.

Volunteer crew on the front steps of the Essex house after completing demo.

Around this time James and Nicole and Ethan had started to feel the same pull to Portland that Shawn and I felt a couple of years earlier. They lived in Jeffersontown but had been coming down to Love City every week for months, either to help with the fish fry, or other events and programs at the Mackin. About one block up from the Mackin building on 26th St, there was a large brick house on the corner that had been vacant for many years. It as the old family home for a group of siblings that were now adults. Their parents had passed away and they had inherited the house. A kitchen fire from years ago had damaged the back of the house and it needed significant renovation. As James and Nicole started praying through this pull to Portland, they reached out to the siblings to see if they would be interested in selling the house. At first, they weren’t interested, but James just decided to pray and wait. A few months later they came back and agreed to sell. They settled on a sales price and closed the deal. Not long after that James and Nicole put their house in Jeffersontown on the market. Almost as a last-ditch test of God to see if they were correctly feeling this pull to move. It would mean a significant change for their family, Ethan was now a junior in high school, Katelyn was away at college, and little Eli was still in the toddler phase. If the house sold, they would take that as a sign they should move. Their house was on the market for one day and it sold. Not only did they now know the direction they should go with their family, but they also had nowhere to live. The house in Portland was just starting to get renovated and they had to be out of their current house in 30 days. The packed up their things, put it in storage, and moved into their parents’ house. Now the goal was getting the renovation complete. Love City came together to help. We had volunteer groups regularly coming so we assigned a few to help them demo their house. A few months later the house was ready, and the Essex family moved into the neighborhood around Christmas time 2017.

Eli age 4 giving Shawn a birthday gift, a framed Chinese character for Love.

By the next summer Ethan was a regular intern, both throughout the summer and after school most days. Katelyn was engaged and had her wedding at St Cecilia, which Love City had just purchased a few months before toward the end of 2017. Eli was growing like a weed and the whole family still came every Friday to help with the fish fry, which by then had morphed into Porkland BBQ. Shawn and Ethan spent the most time together talking about the kingdom and loving people. Ethan went away to college for one year and then transferred to online so he could stay at home, being away at college wasn’t his thing, so he became a “permanent” intern at Love City. By doing school online, he was able to fast track his degree and graduated in 2021. He rotated through almost every job at Love City, allowing him to develop a deep understanding of the community and neighborhood. James and Nicole, also from living in the neighborhood, became the “pastors” of their block. They knew every one of their neighbors, as well as most of the transient folks who camped out in various places around the neighborhood and would occasionally hit them up for grass cutting work etc.

Ethan and Nicole walking down the aisle at Katelyn's wedding at St Cecilia.

Soon after Mighty Oak Academy started in 2021, we started talking with Nicole about her coming on as the school administrator. She is a nurse and had worked at Norton Health care for almost 30 years, but she was passionate about education and passionate about our neighborhood. It was a long transition but in May of 2022 Nicole left Norton and started full time as the school administrator of Mighty Oak Academy. Over this summer Ethan, who has been a part of Love City since he was 16 years old, who spent countless hours with Shawn listening to him talk about love and the kingdom of heaven, was ordained as a pastor at St Cecilia for our community. James also just started his first term on the Love City Board of Directors as well.

James and Nicole on one of our trips to Israel.

When I think about the Essex family the first word that comes to mind is destiny. A lot of people look at me and Shawn and try to hold us up as some great example of sacrifice and service. They look at how we sold our home, moved to Portland and took this great chance in buying a run-down community center. But as I reflect on the last seven years, I see that all of this, Love City, Portland, the neighborhood, developing community, it’s not about me and Shawn. Shawn and I did say yes first, to come to Portland and follow the spirit, but our yes, just opened the door for what I believe is the more important yes, the yes of the Essex family. In many ways, this was all for them, it is their destiny. I spoke at Ethan’s ordination about destiny, and I think it fits well for all the Essex family and how they have walked into the destiny that God planned for them:

“Shawn and I were talking yesterday about how, when you live with God directing your life, you sometimes don’t always see that path of destiny He has laid out for you until you look back and see past events in the light of what’s happening in the present. You can then start to see how he has taken every life event, every circumstance and interaction and used it to develop you into the person you were created to be. You start to get a glimpse into the destiny that He has created for you. However, when you can look back and see how he has used the events in your life to help create His planned destiny for someone else, that’s when you get to see a picture of what it’s like to live fully in the Kingdom of God. Shawn and I can both look back at events in our individual lives before we met each other, and events in our life together and see how not only God was bringing us to our own destinies but that he was using us as part of His larger purpose to help bring you to this day, this ordination, this consecration of your purposed destiny in His kingdom. ”

God used Shawn and me, to open the door for the Essex family to walk into their destiny. Shawn and I will always and forever be at Love City, we will continue to guide and lead and follow the spirit, and the Essex family are also a part of the God's vision for Portland as well. They have a position that God had planned for them from the beginning. Their story is every bit as important and significant as ours. It’s a beautiful picture of the kingdom of heaven, intertwined destinies working toward his purpose of spreading love.

MIGHTY OAK ACADEMY...

One of the hallmarks of Mighty Oak Academy is that it is a community school. All of our students live within a 2 mile radius of our school. While we do have parent participation requirements for volunteering and participating in our parent program, we only charge $50 a month in tuition, in order to keep the school as an affordable option for our families. The true cost for a student to attend Mighty Oak Academy however is around $13,000 a year. If you are interested in helping to sponsor one of our students please click the donate button below or reach out to us for more information.

FISH FRYDAY!

Today is FRYDAY! We are open from 11am - 7pm. Come stop by to grab a fresh fish sandwich for lunch or dinner!

2519 St Cecilia St
502-890-5988
11am - 7pm
Dine In, Take Out, Curbside

If you are interested in volunteering or to find out more information about supplies needed please email: info@lovecityinc.org or call (502) 272-078.

Please consider partnering financially with Love City. We are looking for sponsors for students at Mighty Oak Academy as well as partners to help fund construction of our new preschool. Click the button below to donate today.

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