Risky Business-- GMT Summer Staff

 

For the second summer, I’m working for a company called Group Mission Trips. College students are sent out all over the country with a team, a Penske truck full of thousands of dollars of equipment, and a credit card. Sounds risky huh? We’re entrusted with the mission of sharing God’s love with high school students, youth leaders, residents, local organizations, and everyone we encounter along the way. With only 2 weeks of training and getting to know one another, we’re sent out as student missionaries. To any normal business, taking a risk like this is suicide. For Group Mission Trips, this is the risk they are called to by Christ. The full-time staff does everything they can to prepare us for our positions, fill us up with Christ, and be a resource throughout the summer. However, they are well aware that they can’t control what will happen at hundreds of camps throughout the summer. In my eyes, this is a beautiful and fully necessary risk to take because it’s rooted in the mission of Jesus Christ.

Ask any summer staffer—it’s quite a risk to leave behind your friends, family, home, and summer to be placed on team of strangers doing a very demanding and stressful job. I’m amazed by the courage of the ladies on my crew this summer that have never even been to a mission trip with Group—they are quite literally walking by faith rather than sight. We live out of suitcases, sleep on school floors, and drive to the middle of nowhere to set up a camp where students spend a week doing free home repair for a community. Not only is this job thrilling, fulfilling, and adventurous—it’s downright terrifying. No summer staffer ‘knows’ that this is the right risk to take; the job offer doesn’t come in a sparkly box with a pretty ribbon that says “This is God’s plan for you!” Risk looks ugly and dangerous; it feels like paralyzing fear or even imminent disaster. We embark on our journeys with anxiety, fear, and worries! There’s nobody that can promise us that we won’t struggle or fail, in fact, we’re promised during training that we will face challenges and stressful circumstances. So why take the risk?

Because that’s where we find God. In the overwhelming anxiety of a situation where you have no control or insight into the future, faith takes over. We love the mission and purpose of Group Mission Trips, so we give up 3 months to serve others and trust God with the unknown.

Our culture is obsessed with certainty and safety and it can severely inhibit our spiritual lives. Jesus never called anyone to an easy existence with a predictable outcome! The man asked strangers to leave their families and everything they’d ever known to follow him—a dirty, homeless guy that pissed off the authorities. Sounds like something your parents would teach you to avoid at all costs. And yet, they followed. Imagine selling everything you owned, saying goodbye to those you are closest to in this world, and not knowing if you’d ever see any of it again. For all you know, you’ll wind up dead or in jail for life. Christians have always been risk-takers.

They followed because Jesus moved their hearts with a truth that can’t be found anywhere else. It comes from the belief and faith that this man sacrificed everything he had to set us free from our own demons and flaws. He loves us with an unconditional, radical, and uncomfortable love. Most people can’t take a compliment without feeling awkward… He died for you—how uncomfortable is that? We respond by walking blindly into situations that wreck us with fear, but give us life. What are you afraid of? Telling someone you truly love them and being rejected? Walking away from the only friends you have because you know they aren’t good for you? Ending a marriage that’s toxic and winding up alone? Changing your major without a clue what you will do instead? Those situations all terrify us because they involve investing in something that goes off the clear cut path and winds up in messy, confusing territory. We’re called to leave the things that prevent us from loving God, ourselves, and others wholeheartedly. We’re called to walk away from the situations that we know are wrong and the ones that feel wrong deep down in our souls. Maybe they aren’t blatantly detrimental, but they slowly sap our joy and passion for life—we’re called to leave it and turn to God.

I’ve been a control freak in my love life for as long as I can remember. I had low self esteem and copious amounts of baggage that steered me toward the nearest relationship in times of loneliness or desperation. As I’ve worked through those issues and re-centered myself on what’s really meaningful to me, I’ve learned some very important lessons. Love is messy! If it’s easy, and doesn’t make you uncomfortable or worried, it’s not love. I used to think, “I’ll know when it’s right because it’ll just be easy. The timing will be right, the guy will be right, everything will just fall into place.” No. There will always be excuses to shy away from love because it’s terrifying and risky. Now I don’t ask myself if it’s easy or good timing, I ask myself if the relationship challenges me and helps me grow in faith. I assess my reasons for being in the relationship and I articulate what values the relationship must be founded on. I don’t ask myself if the guy is perfect, I ask myself if he’s honest, compassionate, committed to Christ, and ready to work hard for love. Miraculously enough, as soon as I started asking the right questions, things got much better for me. I now find myself in a relationship that faces a unique set of challenges and roadblocks, but I’m not worried about the rough terrain because I’m focused on making sure we have a foundation to withstand the unexpected storms of life. I have no idea if he’ll love me in five days or five years, but I know that we’re both in the relationship for the right reasons and that’s all the certainty I need. Being able to talk openly about our fears and worries with taking the risk of trusting one another has made this the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had. At the end of the day, it’s still not easy, and I don’t want it to be.

A Christian life isn’t easy, perfect, or neatly laid out in front of us—if we’re too comfortable, we aren’t being honest with ourselves and we aren’t investing in our faith as much as we think we are. However, we can always be certain that God will appear in the dysfunction, hardship, pain, and risk if we let Him. He fills our stories with unpredictable, humorous, crazy, and beautiful twists and turns if we trust Him, and at the end of our lives we’ll see that he’s a much better author than we could ever be.

A False Sense of Community

Throughout my time at college I’ve become more and more attached to a particular issue—sexual assault. I find myself growing more intensely passionate and infuriated about the injustice I’ve seen surrounding sexual assault. It’s an issue of deep complexity, and no two situations are the same. This makes it incredibly difficult to address in a general way, but I strongly believe it’s all the more reason that it needs to be addressed. Over the past month or so I’ve been working hard on figuring out where I fit into this issue; I’ve decided to be a voice for the voiceless and start a campaign.

It’s both a blessing and a tragedy that I’m so emotionally attached to the issue—because as you may imagine, my attachment comes from personal experience with sexual assault. I still struggle to see myself as a victim, because I spent three years blaming myself and hating myself for what happened to me. There’s so much I didn’t know or understand at the time of the first assault, and I was isolated by my own embarrassment and fear. Unfortunately, people who are victims of abuse or assault are at a much greater risk for sexual assault—so my first experience wasn’t my last. It’s only this year that I’ve begun the healing process, and it’s been incredibly challenging and painful every day. The way I regard myself as a woman is deformed and twisted because of the self-hatred that I’ve fostered for so long. I’ve learned to define my worth by my physical appeal and value to men, and I’ve experienced dissociation from my own body. It’s poisoned relationships and affected my life in every single way. I can’t take back anything that’s happened to me, but I can choose to push forward in my personal healing and break the silence surrounding this issue so less people suffer through what I’ve experienced.

The small liberal arts college I attend faces some unique challenges regarding this issue because we are split between two campuses. It affects the party scene, and also intensifies gender stereotyping in our culture. However, in my research I’ve found that small liberal arts colleges face many of the same challenges. It’s counter-intuitive, but the risk of sexual assault is actually much higher at small liberal arts colleges. There’s a false sense of security and safety—we are too trusting. If we were in a large city, we’d likely practice much more caution in wandering around to parties while under the influence. In small St. Joseph, MN, it’s normal for students to drunkenly wander in and out of parties where they don’t know the owner of the house or many of the students at the parties. Particularly for a first-year student, this is an incredibly vulnerable situation. Additionally, the idea that Bennies and Johnnies are all trustworthy people makes it quite easy for vulnerable students to be manipulated, and potentially assaulted, whether or not alcohol is involved. Beyond that, underreporting is exacerbated at small colleges. It doesn’t matter if the report doesn’t go public—everyone will find out who the involved parties are. And disgustingly enough, reporters are at incredibly high risk for harassment and bullying after reporting the assault. In my first year at St. Ben’s I knew several women who were assaulted early on in the year, they reported the assault, and they were bullied to the point where they left the school. Victim blaming is incredibly prevalent and it is so destructive for survivors of sexual assault. I know from personal experience that I didn’t need anyone to blame me for what happened; I blamed myself more than anyone else ever could. To further complicate the issue, first-year and sophomore students are often on their own in the journey. Upperclassmen students had their experiences and learned from them the hard way, and they choose to be silent and leave it in the past, rather than shepherd and help the incoming students.

A community that remains silent on the issue of sexual assault is not a community at all.

It is not the job of the administration or faculty to solve these problems for us—it is the job of the students. It’s our community, our culture, and our college experience. It is every single student’s responsibility to take this issue seriously, because every single student at this school knows someone that’s been affected by sexual assault—whether or not they realize it. If we don’t care about each other enough to make our school safe, we aren’t a community. If we don’t validate and support those who’ve suffered—if we instead isolate, bully, accuse, and blame them, we are not a community.

Community is the buzz-word of our college, so let’s start practicing what we preach.

I’ve been working closely with a few students, along with the assistant director of health promotion, to discuss and brainstorm programs that will address this issue. Every single program we plan to implement is student-led, because this is an issue belongs first and foremost to the student body. These programs involve discussion groups for incoming students that are open, honest, and led by upperclassmen. These programs involve upperclassmen advocates on athletic teams that vow to intervene when incoming students are pressured to participate in things that make them uncomfortable, or face rejection. These programs involve critical, intentional reflection on what the college experience is truly about, and what each of us personally values most about our schools.

If you’d like more information, or would like to be involved, please e-mail me at slskelly@csbsju.edu. If not, you’ll be hearing more about this in the Fall—that’s a promise.

Starving for a Call

Where is our place in the paradox of privilege? We call ourselves Christian, we preach of a love that heals and elevates our nature— but we live luxurious lives bound up in material idolatry. I’m constantly crushed between the tension of Christ and culture— what’s right and what’s possible. I recognize my inability to love fully and the sins that limit my potential. I also see within myself a fire and a yearning like none other to live truthfully and radically. I often feel like I’m a stranger on a campus where everyone thinks about their future, because I think more about the future of the world itself. I can’t point fingers or place blame, nor do I want to. What I want, and need, is a call. A call to sell everything and follow Jesus. A call to lay down my life for the sake of another. A call to leave this place of privilege, materialism, and entitlement. A call that is so compelling and meaningful that I can’t resist following it. I’m drowning in a sea of responsibility for the injustice of my nation, my religion, my culture, my generation, and my own soul. I want to do what’s meaningful and right with my mind, my time, my talents, and my passion— but where do I find it? 

So often when I pose these questions I am met with responses that are watered down and unsatisfying— 'you can’t save the whole world, so choose one thing and do it well.' That answer paralyzes me because I have no authority to choose which thing deserves to be done above another. Even when I look to adults in my life that I admire, I’m not sure I’d be okay with the lives they’re living, because they’re still bound up in materialism and systematic injustice. Honestly, I can’t imagine a world where we aren’t all bound up in it. I don’t judge, because I feel my own limitations so fully, but I wonder if we should be doing more. If we should be aspiring to more meaningful, life-giving ends. If we should somehow find the strength the break away from a culture that worships celebrities, feeds loneliness with consumerism, trusts no one, condemns other ethnicities, sees women as objects for sexual pleasure, and believes more faithfully in the barrel of a gun than the political system in power. What scares me more than the horrific culture we’re all submerged in, is the apathy so many people have toward it. If we don’t deeply care about another human’s right to live safely and freely, regardless of their race, gender, background, religion, or nationality, what do we care about? I hope with my whole soul that I’m not alone in this questioning and struggling. I hope that I won’t ever be convinced that I care too much, no matter how often I hear it.

People often say that at the end of our lives we won’t care about how much money we made, how successful we were, or how many superficial things we crossed of our bucket lists— it’ll all be about the relationships we’ve had and ways we’ve bettered the world. I want to have that realization every single day of my life, not just the day I die. Do you?

Inked.

Let me start this post by admitting that I love tattoos. I think they can be a beautiful expression of a life story when they are well thought-out and artistic. I'm not a proponent of getting a tattoo just for the sake of having one, but obviously I think they can be done right! I have two tattoos now, and I'm very fond of them both because they mean so much to me. I didn't ask permission for either of them, because they're on my body, and represent something only I can fully understand. (Sorry mom J)

I always get questions about my tattoos, so I thought I'd share my inspiration for the newest one here. My roommate and very dear friend, Mackenzie, designed this cross for me. That, in and of itself, has so much meaning to it. Mackenzie has supported me and lifted me up in some very difficult times. She's seen my struggles and weaknesses, but continues to love me anyway. I wouldn't have asked anyone else to design this for me! When we started talking about what I wanted several months ago, I explained what I was looking for and let her creativity do the rest. 

My life has been a roller coaster of sadness and joy, defeat and triumph. I've lost people very close to me with no understanding of why. I had a hole in my heart from a young age when my dad was deployed. I've been so lost and hopeless that I turned to people who simply took advantage of my brokenness and hurt me further.  I turned to men, alcohol, partying, self-harm, anorexia, and attempted suicide to cope with the darkness I saw and felt within my soul. Luckily, the Lord found me amidst me suffering, and I gave my heart up to Him in desperation. God brought people into my life that I could trust and lean on in times of hardship and doubt. God is still teaching me how to love myself, but that battle never really ends. Now that I'm flourishing in college, I'm constantly amazed that all of the suffering I inflicted upon myself and faced from others has inspired incredible growth. God has recycled the sadness in my life, and brought joy forth. I've been able to support others through their battles in a special way. I've learned to depend on God for fulfillment. I've learned to be vulnerable and honest, because love isn't real without it. My life is rich and full because I let God heal me and teach me. The cross Mackenzie designed is very sharp and harsh-- the lines are dark and the edges hard. I wanted this to represent the hardship and pain of my suffering, and the immense suffering Jesus endured on the cross. Intertwined with the cross is a vine that sprouts into flowers; I wanted this to represent the vulnerability, beauty, life, and growth that God brought forth from my suffering. It also shows that Jesus' sacrifice made life possible for humanity. My life will never be devoid of hardship, but if I keep God as my focus, I will continue to grow and find new life. Every step I take, I'll see my tattoo and be reminded of that beautiful truth. 

 

The City of Brotherly Love

I was lucky enough to spend a week in Philadelphia, PA with a group of 9 inspiring Bennies and Johnnies and 2 fantastic staff people. My friend Colin and I were the co-leaders of the trip, and facilitated a lot of the pre-trip preparation, but we had an easy job in Philly because our group took the lead all on their own! We spent the week with the Center for Student Missions or CSM, an organization that facilitates service trips for groups all over the country, and gives us a place to stay and an awesome host for the week. So after 22 fun-filled hours of driving over 2 days, we arrived in Philly and brought a snow storm with us! It was barely a storm by Minnesota standards, but three inches of snow got school cancelled on Monday for Philly’s students.

On Sunday when we arrived around 4 PM, we had a chance to unpack quick, then hop back in the van to grab dinner at a fabulous Indian restaurant. After dinner we began a prayer tour of the city, and it was one of the greatest introductions to a city I’ve ever had. We spent about 2 hours driving around Philadelphia and praying for the different issues it’s facing. Our host Brittany didn’t stop talking for more than a minute or two, because there was so much to share about the city. We saw the famous areas of Philly like the City Hall and Love Park, but then we started touring the impoverished areas of Philly like Kensington. We stopped under a bridge to pray for the homeless men, women, and children of Philly. We stopped by various schools in rough neighborhoods that are doing their best to help students succeed, but are facing budget cuts and other problems. We stopped by missions that strive to assist the marginalized people of Philly, and we even stopped by a few of the beautiful murals that cover Philadelphia. We ended our prayer tour with heavy hearts, at a scenic overlook of the city. As we looked out at the beautiful nighttime skyline, it was easy to see that things look better from far away. Brittany encouraged us, and told us that despite the heaviness of the issues, we’d see a lot of promise in Philly during the week. She was unmistakably correct.

We spent our week in Philly serving with a variety of organizations. We spent a morning with the Inglis House, a home for people who are wheelchair bound for a variety of reasons. Despite the conditions of the residents, we saw so much joy and life in the people we met! Each and every person we met had a distinct personality, and they weren’t hesitant to share it with us. It was inspiring to say the least.

We spent another morning working with men at the Whosoever Gospel Mission. This organization houses men who recently got off the streets, or left jail. The staff provide resources for the men like work at the thrift shop, or work around the housing facility. The community strives to uplift the men and give them the resources they need to get back on their feet and find work. We helped sort clothes at their thrift shop and then had an opportunity to talk with the men over lunch. Each of the residents we spoke with had a life story that was both complex and unpredictable. Our group had stereotypes shattered as we spoke to these men who had come from a variety of situations, but treated us all with kindness and respect. There was an incredible sense of solidarity within that community, and we were lucky to be welcomed in!

We also volunteered with the Honickman Learning Center for three afternoons. Honickman provides after school care and tutoring for students in elementary school through high school, but all of the students are from the projects. Somewhere around 70% of the students at Honickman don’t have father figures in their lives, and many of them didn’t get three meals a day at home. They came from a rough area, and faced a lot of challenges. We worked with Ms. Chris’s class for the week and were able to help 2^nd and 3^rd grade students. We noticed very quickly that many of the students had issues with learning and discipline, but they still met us with kindness, joy, and excitement every day. Ms. Chris was stern and focused with the students—she spoke of college frequently, and reminded the students that there is a better life outside the projects, but they’ll have to work very hard for it. She understands how incredibly difficult it is for kids to break the cycle of poverty, and avoid getting wrapped up in illegal activities. But Ms. Chris and all of the teachers at Honickman empower the students there, and do everything they can to help them break the cycle.

Another moving experience for our group was working with Hands of Hope delivering bag lunches to homeless people seeking shelter in the subway. We began the night with 20 lunches, and gave every single one away. We split up into smaller groups and spent a couple hours walking around trying to talk with various people and give them some food. Many of our group were nervous, because they had negative experiences with homeless people in the past or were fearful of them. However, every single one of us met people in the subway who were kind and loving toward us. We heard stories from various people who faced huge challenges in life, and were simply down on their luck. We met others who were resistant to take the food, or to talk with strangers. We had a variety of experiences, but none of them were what we expected. There was a sense of community in the subway—people were taking care of each other, and they were seeking connection with others. We were glad to provide a meal to anyone, but even more grateful to listen to their stories for a while and show them compassion. Our hearts ached for the people we met, but we were moved by their joy and openness.

Our other service experiences were sorting toys with Salvation Army, cleaning up the streets with Rays of Hope, and sorting food with Philabundance. These experiences didn’t work directly with people who needed help, and sometimes they were less-than-glamorous tasks. In each situation, the work was never-ending. It was important for us to contribute to these organizations, and to see that those jobs are important too. It inspired great respect for the people who work tirelessly to help others, and often don’t receive thanks for it. Philadelphia is a city with so many nonprofit organizations and churches working toward justice—it’s astonishing. We were uplifted by each of them, but recognized that there’s still so much to be done.

Our experiences were so fruitful, and reflecting on them provided even more insight for us. We began the week with the prayer tour, and it left us with heavy hearts. It was difficult to hear about the issues in Philly because they felt insurmountable—what kind of difference could we make in one short week? Incredibly enough, as we were able to work with people throughout the week we felt more and more encouraged. Each person we meant was a gift, and inspired us in a new way. As we worked on issues it felt like change was possible, it was only in the beginning before we had begun work that we saw change as impossible. We shattered stereotypes, crushed fears, built community, trusted each other, and spent a life-changing week together. I will forever be inspired by a city full of beautiful murals and miraculous people, and the friends I explored it with.