March 2006

My mom’s reflections on her visit to my neighborhood a few weeks ago…

Faith. Courage. Dedication. Tenacity. Patience. Curiosity. Playfulness. Hospitality. This is what I experienced when I visited the Campbell Street girls the weekend of February 24^th. It comes through in the monthly letters you receive—but it truly materialized for me through my visit.

The neighborhood is desolate and scary. But the neighbors are warm and wonderful. We met Mason and Jazmin (and their siblings). We met Hendrik and the Saturday morning breakfast crew. We met the Mt. Zion church choir members (including Jahon, who invited us to sing with the choir and Gabrielle, who has befriended the girls and made them part of her extended family). We met Stacy, Robert, and Hannah. We met Keekee and Taranicha. Our girls are street smart and showed us the ropes of how to navigate the neighborhood—including what to say (and what not to say). Though they come from very different backgrounds, they are a team and have figured out a way to cooperate and live together (in very close quarters indeed!).

Though there are many many memories from the weekend, the highlight (aside from visiting my angel) was singing in the Mt. Zion church choir on Sunday morning. We were told we enriched the alto section. It was moving to hear the marvelous sounds coming from our intimately-sized choir—an experience I will never forget! Of course, meeting everyone (roommates, families, other team members, and neighbors) was another highlight. I can’t wait to go back.

Keep these girls in your hearts. As frightening as their mission is, they are doing good things and making an impact—one person at a time.

As we were driving towards the hotel on the last day of her visit, my mom asked me how a Mission Year team is measured in its success. How does the city director know, she asked, if the team should come back to the neighborhood the next year? I realize this is a question that a lot of sensible people might ask and coming from the social service world where systems are sought to measure success and impact, it was not an arbitrary question. However, I also realize that measuring results in the kingdom of God is like trying to differentiate between variants of sunlight from day to day. Sure if one day is cloudless and the next grayed with thunderstorms the difference is clear and, with some sort of meteorological tool, measurable. But from one day to the next, especially in Oakland, the variance is slight. Some days you may notice the sun reflecting in certain ways that you didn’t see before or you may notice the clouds are a little fluffier than usual, but for the most part it’s hard to quantify these types of observations. All this is applicable to the general public excluding the portion of which are meteorologists, and those specific people have been trained to see these types of changes with a keener eye than the rest of us.

What are the measures of success for a team in Mission Year? What are the results that we’re looking for? I think part of the answer is just like noticing those sunlight differences from day to day. Some days it seems like nothing is going right—the first graders aren’t listening, the junior high girls at the after school club act like first graders, and I’m really not in the mood to go to Bible study. Other days I feel like I’m the local expert on everything I seem to encounter—my kindergarten class acts calmly and politely, I help someone add finesse to a resume that lands them the perfect job, and my teammates and I share joy at home playing cards or making milkshakes. However, truth be told, most days it’s somewhere in between. The great thing is that no matter what I notice (or don’t notice) the kingdom of God is advancing. This means hope, love, gentleness, trust, grace are being shared. And, each day I’m praying that God gives me, like the meteorologist, a keener eye and more receptive heart to see how these slight movements are happening.

The other part of the answer is what I told my mom that day. I want to be here, loving the people around me as best as I can. In fact, the best that I can offer is pretty weak. So really, I want to be here, making myself available to be used as a vessel in distributing God’s love as best as I can discern how. My hope is that in loving even one person in the form of God’s unconditional, unchanging, gracious nature, his or her life will be changed in some small way that will then affect the surrounding people. A ripple effect of sorts—in a culture where everyone is feeling pressured by someone to do something or prove this or that, why not apply pressure to love more freely or give more generously or spend time more patiently? Success comes in loving well, in fully living out the hope of the gospel, as opposed to trying to come up with the perfect words or slogans. I gave the example to my mom that it may look like us somehow being able to communicate to any one of our teenage friends that they do not need to have a baby to feel unconditionally loved. In turn, they’ll take this radical knowledge and its truth will permeate their life and the lives they touch. In this ripple system, we are playing one role among many in the process of seed planting, cultivating, tilling, etc. We may not see the harvest of the fruits from seeds which we sow, but spending the time to invest in love is worth every second.

The ironic thing is that God would choose someone like me to transport His message. An Emily who just this year began to understand what grace really means. An Emily who can barely go a week without getting annoyed at her teammates about something stupid. Recently we read an article where the author talked about how he realized that his bad days weren’t caused so much by external forces but more by his reaction to not getting his way. These remarks have stuck with me. I needed someone else to say it about himself for me to realize its truth for my life. So this broken Emily, whose “bad days” come from not getting her way in some way or another, is being used by the God of the universe to share His amazing love with some amazing people everyday. Crazy…

A quote I came across the other day seems to wrap up these ideas much more fully and eloquently than I could. Author Brian McLaren extrapolates on Thomas Merton’s words in saying, “‘Do not depend on the hope of results,’ Merton said. Being involved in God’s work requires us to face the fact that our work will at times appear to achieve… ‘no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.’ Far better than being obsessed with results, whether in social work or evangelism, is to focus on the value of the work itself, and on the value of being genuine friends with those we serve…Merton also warned his friend from using social work to make an identity for himself… ‘All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love.’”