A Tattoo on Sample Street

During the month of November, Jason Miller encouraged our community at South Bend City Church to practice gratitude by building altars – tangible memorials to the goodness of God in our lives.

It was clear during Jason’s first week of teaching on this practice that I was to build an altar to Vested Interest by way of a tattoo beside my four-year-old grid tattoo.

In the early months of 2017, I was at Langlab for a gathering when Rami Mikhail-Sadek, the building’s co-owner, pulled me aside and said, “I’ve got a building for you to check out.” He told me that Ziker Cleaners, a century-old dry cleaning company in South Bend, had recently moved its operations from its original 70,000 sf facility on Sample Street to a new 10,000 sf facility and, thus far, had been unable to sell the former. In an effort to keep the facility from joining the ranks of South Bend’s empty and under-utilized industrial buildings, David Ziker, the third-generation owner of the company, enlisted Rami to help develop a vision of how the building could once more be made productive.

And so, in June 2017, I moved out of my home office into the former uniform customer service office – a group of three small offices built into the corner of a garage – and we named the project Vested Interest.

At this point, I was six months into self-employment and life was not rosy. Kristen and I had run out of money three months prior, a planned business partner changed their mind about moving to South Bend, and I was north of $5,000 in business debt. It felt like the theory behind our work was just wrong.

This building and the people who inhabit it are the primary reason that I am not in the same situation today.

Over the next two and half years, South Bend on Purpose, Tutt and Carroll and Permit Pending would be conceived and founded in this building. My friendships and later collaborations with Helen Cramer, Dustin Mix, Maria Gibbs, and Kevin Lawler would all form in this building. 

I’m not an expert on the goodness of God, but I feel it on Sample Street.

Watch a brief video of the tattoo process:

 Sign up to receive new stories in your inbox: