Service/Mission/Leadership Blog

It wasn’t until the 6 hour ride back home after our New Orleans trip the next night that something hit me.

And that something was the Holy Spirit.

I thought about Marion and remembered the statistics on that foreign word, poverty, of my own college town…the town I now call “home.” Perry County is one of the 20 poorest in the nation, and I hadn’t done a single thing that should allow me to call myself a member of the Body reaching out to change the perfect picture of poverty, despair, need, and hopelessness that surrounds me everyday.

During my freshman year at Judson, I literally walked right past lonely people working themselves silly just to make ends meet every single time I went to the store in Marion.

Just a few miles away from my comfy, cozy dorm room were families in homes with no running water.

Every time I used the Marion-Perry County Public Library I sat down at tables with people who couldn’t read desperately trying to scratch out their name on a job application.

I walked past children on my way to church who had never had their parents read a book to them, hug them, or tuck them in at night…not because they weren’t loved, but because their parents were always gone and always working to provide for their families.

And somehow, I never really noticed this until I returned in January after the NOAH project of rebuilding homes in New Orleans. The next year would prove to be enlightening as I learned more about Judson’s service learning department, the work of local churches, and Sowing Seeds of Hope. Christmas break of 2009 brought about an opportunity to do similar home-building work, but it was with the help of Sowing Seeds of Hope Self-Help Housing program, which is a lot like Habitat for Humanity.

And now, here were are! My time as a summer intern to Sowing Seeds of Hope through the Student.Go mission board officially starts June 1. Ryan Dowling and I will be working together, and we met the other half of our fantastic team (two girls from North Carolina) this weekend! As a group, we will be directing and helping the different church groups that come in throughout the summer to serve, assisting with the construction projects and VBS in the community, running literacy camps, and having plenty of fun recreational time with kids and teenagers. But more importantly we hope and pray to break down many of the social barriers in Perry County.

For all of us…this will mean going beyond our comfort zones…even for Ryan and I, who have lived here in Marion for a couple of years now.

Fears of organizing large groups, trying to communicate with people I have nothing in common with, bridging the gaps between Marion’s churches, and working to start something more long term than just a summer ministry leave me feeling most uncomfortable…but in the best sort of way. Keep our team and the people of Perry County in your prayers this summer, and I promise to keep you posted on God’s response!

Without Wax

My service with Sowing Seeds of Hope for the summer officially starts Tuesday! I just got back to Judson from Student. Go’s mission orientation…which you will hear much more about later, but for the moment I can’t help but think about how all of this began. What brings about a desire to stay in Marion, Alabama for an entire summer?

Go back with me to the winter of 2008. During Christmas break, I went along with some other Judson girls to New Orleans. We were joining a team called “NOAH” to help repair and rebuild homes and churches destroyed my hurricane Katrina. I’d never done any type of mission work before then, and I certainly hadn’t gone on a “mission trip.” But for whatever reason, I had the strongest desire to go spend a week in New Orleans with this group. And since my dad worked construction from the time I was a little girl until I was about eighteen, I knew more about the business of fixing things than any young woman should…and I felt like I could be pretty useful on the trip.

My first few days “on the job” was spent in a nice neighborhood that didn’t seem to be too affected by the storm. We worked on an elderly woman’s home who didn’t have the money to hire construction workers because she had used all of her resources to rebuild the school she ran for autistic children (a testimony in itself, no doubt)!

This widow and I had a few good conversations about her students; even then I secretly wanted to teach. She told me of how Katrina took a toll on New Orleans’ kids, in general, but especially those stricken with poverty.

Poverty?

I’m embarrassed to say that, until this point, this word was not even in my vocabulary. Poverty was a problem in big inner cities and foreign countries.

Poverty was not a part of my world, and it was not my concern. Poverty was not in this nice little neighborhood or a part of this nice old teacher’s life…right?

During the last few days of the mission trip, my team was sent to a completely different type of neighborhood, to say the very least.

There were no white picket fences or window boxes full of flowers.

Kids didn’t ride their shiny new bikes down paths in the park. If they even owned bikes, they had to maneuver around piles of trash and ruins from the storm. People sat in the streets…just because they didn’t know what else to do, and there was a FEMA trailer in front of every single ruined house on the street.

This neighborhood reeked with the smell of despair.

We were able to do the final work on a house before the family could move out of the FEMA trailer and back into their home. We all cried tears of joy together on our last day, and the impact we had on the family’s quality of life was highly evident. The team as a whole naturally felt a great burden in leaving the rest of neighborhood in such disarray without be able to serve the other families as we had this one, but our time was up.

We packed our tools, said our goodbyes, and loaded the van.

We took a slightly different route back to the church we’d been housed in for the week that day, and to this day I wonder if our team leader did this intentionally. Either way, it must have been a God thing. Instead of heading back out on the main road and hitting the interstate, we drove through the streets parallel to the one we’d been working on. As we looked for a different ramp onto the interstate we drove past a beautiful new church building that stood on the corner like a beacon of hope in a dark community.

I don’t think I have ever been so angry.

I know now that it was not my place to pass judgment on this building or the people it represented, but I was infuriated.

How can these “Christians,” I thought let their world look this way? This church was literally a block away from the home we worked on and surrounded by a perfect picture of poverty, despair, need, and hopelessness.

Where was the Body of Christ, and why was it not reaching out to these people and this neighborhood just around the corner?

This was my first experience in going beyond my own culture. There were not language barriers, and I didn’t need a passport to get there…but this place was not one that I would ever call my own. I traveled to a culture outside of the comfortable middle class life I’d always been accustomed to, and I saw real need for the first time.

Little did I know that this “beyond” was just the beginning.

Without Wax

In the movie Déjà Vu starring Denzel Washington, a federal agent is assigned the task of recovering evidence during the aftermath of a ferry explosion in New Orleans. He ends up being pulled away to a top-secret government lab that uses time-shifting surveillance technology to prevent crime, but the team eventually discovers how to send the agent back in time to change the entire event. The whole movie is a bit confusing at first, and the detective has to figure out which perspective of time (past, present, or future) that he’s working from. Now, I’m not stopping crime or time traveling this summer, but I do understand a bit about  this shifting point of view the agent is always facing.

I don’t know what it is lately, but it seems to me that time is always slipping right by me completely unnoticed. Short term is flying by, and May block is almost over. In two weeks I’ll be taking finals…again, even though it seems like I just recovered from the spring semester’s finals. 

To be honest, I don’t have to do much work for my classes, and I spent the first few days of this spectacular summer term wondering what to do with myself…I’m so used to having a more hectic schedule. Two of my classes are being taken independently, and aside from the hour and ten minutes I spend in Ecology every morning, I have everyday to myself.

Looking back now, I can see just how well having all of this “free” time is working to prepare me for my summer internship with Sowing Seeds of Hope. Since I don’t officially start until June 1, I’ve had the opportunity to make appropriate plans (more info on that to come!) and allow God to prepare me for this summer. So naturally, I’ve been spending a great deal of time in prayer. In fact, it’s pretty safe to admit that I have never prayed so much in my life about any one particular thing than I have for the city of Marion and the work that’s being planned here for this summer.

Even though the days are flying by, one thing that I’ve learned already during the course of this very short term is that worship, especially prayer, expands our vision. When I think of the things that I can do, I lose sight of what my abilities could be in the hands of God, but when all the planning and brainstorming and meetings about missions are seen through what God can do through me…my perspective shifts.

I read an analogy once claiming that prayer is much like staring at one of those two dimensional posters that suddenly leaps out at us in three dimensions.

Suddenly we can see things that we’ve never seen before.

Everything changes when God is in the picture.

 Without Wax,

"O LORD, make me know my end
 and what is the measure of my days;
 let me know how fleeting I am!
Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths,
 and my lifetime is as nothing before you.
Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath!

Psalm 39: 4-5

Did you ever make mud pies when you were a kid? Maybe I’m revealing a bit too much of my southern upbringing right now, but I have always and still like to play in the mud. In fact, I can remember sitting in my granny’s front yard as a young girl with all sorts of plastic kitchen toys, random containers, spoons, and old measuring cups creating what I believed to be the most scrumptious “pie” imaginable. Of course, the fact that my granny let me use her measuring cups for my own personal recipes made all the difference.

What is the measure of my days?

How fleeting am I? How fleeting are you?

It’s so strange to realize how vivid these memories of myself as a six or seven year old are, but it is even more strange to realize that I am twenty years old…soon to be a college junior. The mud in my “big girl” measuring cups is running out, and my sophomore year at Judson is almost over!

The lessons learned and the countless fun and exciting experiences of a Judson College sophomore year cannot truly be measured in the same way the ingredients of my mud pies could. But as God reminds me of how fleeting these days are, I’d at least like to try to describe and measure the ingredients of the past year, my second year, as a Judson Girl.

God has taught be patience, and He has taken it to an entirely new level. There is, after all, a very significant difference between waiting and being patient. I believe it was C.S. Lewis who said, "I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait."

I’d like to say that Judson has taught me to stop procrastinating, but what I’ve really learned is that sometimes putting off school work and pulling all-nighters is the best option if you get to do missions work, serve someone in the community, share God’s love with complete strangers on choir tour, help someone on your hall through a rough time at 2am, learn to fly a kite for the first time, or just be fun and spontaneous with your friends.

My Judson sisters have taught me the meaning of the song “Lean on Me,” as cheesy as that sounds. Through pageant, late night traditions, attending the funerals of two high school friends, undergoing and recovering from back surgery, and finally choosing a major, these ladies have truly taught me who to “lean on when I’m not strong,” and the bonds of Judson sisterhood have only grown stronger. In fact, all of my best friends are Judson Girls.

  This is just a taste of a year at Judson, and I am reminded of just how short our days are...only a “few handbreadths” or as long as the length of my own small hands…hands that, by the grace of God and through this wonderful women's college, have come a long way from making mud pies.

Without Wax