Hey, guys. HAPPY SPRING! I am rejoicing; I adore this time of the year. Spring is my second favorite season, after summer because being warm is one of my top 5 favorite things, and I love the smell of everything blooming, freshly cut grass, clear, sunny skies, and being able to frolic in a world coming alive again. It reminds me of Easter and bike rides and childhood, which is really cool.
Anyway, it’s officially Spring and two weeks ago I had Spring Break. It was one of the best weeks of my life and I wanted to tell you about it. Through my church, Morrison Heights, I was a part of a ten person mission team that worked with refugees from all over the world in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. It was my first stateside mission trip and my second mission experience ever, and it totally rocked my world.
The city we worked in is Clarkston and it’s basically a center for refugees, primarily from Asia and Africa. By refugee I mean a person, and usually their family, who have had to flee their country due to some form of oppression: religious, political, etc. These people were not safe in the land of their birth and had to leave their entire lives behind to seek refuge elsewhere. The United States sends these refugees to three cities in our country, and Clarkston is one of them.
It’s a town entirely for refugees. I think I heard the statistic that over 150 languages are spoken there in, like, a 5 or 15 mile radius. So it’s not like any a place I’ve ever been before. I talked to some refugees who have been here for 10 months and I was the first American they had ever had a conversation with. It’s crazy, but it’s also really beautiful, and I miss it so much already.
Why do I miss it? Well, the refugees were some of the kindest humans I have ever met.
I went to Walmart the first day after we got back from our mission trip. I was walking down the cereal aisle and smiled at a middle-aged woman and let her go past me and she didn’t return my smile, only frowned and continued forward. She may have been having a bad day or whatever, but it was so different than every single moment of the previous week I had been in Clarkston, a city full of people who aren’t even my “countrymen.” Everywhere I went, even to a Hindu temple, even to a laundromat where we talked to a young man from Ethiopia and a high school girl from Indonesia about their lives, to a community garden, to the streets, which were literally covered in trash because many of the refugees had to spend up to 18 years in refugee camps before being allowed to enter our country and the camps were dirty and not well kept and hard - everywhere I went in Clarkston, I was smiled at, listened to, communicated to, and, in a very unique way, loved.
The refugees my team and I worked with were some of the sweetest human beings I have had the pleasure to be in contact with, and it just showed me that my loyalties are not to a country or ethnicity or a person who speaks my same language. I am called to love all humans. Also, for the first time I started to realize that through Christ I have a family and that family includes my brothers and sisters in Christ in Africa and Asia and Clarkston and Mississippi. And because they are my family, they deserve my love, compassion, respect and I want to help them.
Now that we’re talking about things I learned on the trip, I wanted to share just a few things this mission trip showed me, and just give you a bigger picture (and some real images) of all we got to do in Clarkston.
One of my favorite things we did throughout the week were Backyard Bible Clubs on the playgrounds of the apartment complexes where the refugees all lived. My team and I would go to these playgrounds where children from all over the world played together, regardless that they were from Somalia or Senegal or Afghanistan and they had no idea how to speak to each other, but they were going to play four square and hopscotch together.
One time I was playing with a tiny little girl still wearing a diaper. She looked Indian and, of course, didn’t speak a lick of English, but she was my friend. She was running ahead of me and stumbled, scraping her knees and bursting into tears. I knelt down and took her on my lap and this other little boy from some Asian country, who had previously been chasing me for a solid 25 minutes with the goal of tackling me and tickling me until I couldn’t breath, knelt beside the two of us and comforted her, stroking her little leg and talking to her in his own native tongue until she stopped crying. I let her go, she ran off and he went over to jump rope with girls from South Africa.
It was so very beautiful.
But we did these Backyard Bible Clubs where we rounded up thirty to forty children by walking through the neighborhood and herding them toward one of the parks, played with them, held a huge tug-of-war match, performed a bible story/skit for them, did a craft, and fed them a snack. Of course, we also gave countless piggy back rides, hugs, and formed relationships.
On our trip God showed me that I have a passion for kids. I didn’t think I wanted any of my own, and when Drew mentioned that we would have to interact with them, I was like “oh, no.” But I did, and I want to for the rest of forever, and children are so amazing.
I got to speak French to little girls from North Africa, one of which knew no English. I took three years of it in high school, but have never conversated in it before the trip, but I was able to. It was crazy, and I’m totally going to master it now, but I got to talk to that little girl in her native tongue about the weather, cats, and how she was doing. It was so amazing.
One of my other favorite memories of the trip was what I have labeled Food Day. We went to a church in Clarkston who, once a week, gets 10,000 pounds of food from grocery stories that’s about to expire but totally still good and useable, sorts it, and allows families to come get a box of food for their family. We spent the morning sorting all the food - I was covered with so much fruit juice and tired and it was chaos - but it was worth it when I got to see all the families come through the church that night and they were so EXCITED that they got food and thankful and maybe that was the only “grocery shopping” (it was free, by the way) they got to do every week.
The day was awesome - we also climbed a mountain that day, which was super dope - but the awesomest thing was when we were debriefing at the end of the day. We were back at our home church where we slept and ate breakfast, in a huge gymnasium, sitting in metal folding chairs around a lone, shaky wooden table. Let me just say: I fell in love with those 10 people on my team. They are great humans and I couldn’t have asked for better people to serve and grow with and love on. They all taught me and showed me who I want to be and I have stories about every single one of them about how they touched my life. However, that night, on Food Day, one of them said something I will never forget and it blew my mind.
He opened his mouth to say something and immediately it was like the room sobered up. He was one of the happiest people I’d ever met and I had never heard much of his personal life, but I had assumed, you know, he was one of those baptist kids who grew up in a Christian home and went to a Christian school and was a great guy and happy, which isn’t at all bad or wrong for me to assume, but it just made what he said be so huge.
He told us that the day had been very important to him because years ago when he had been hungry and without a home, he had gone to a church like that and gotten saved.
God is so so very good. He does crazy things and forms us into who He knows we were supposed to be; He takes the hard, sad, angry things and doesn’t let them be that. He uses them all for a reason, for a purpose. He does that with people, too, and God did that with all of my team members on the trip.
I am so thankful for those people. I am thankful for their friendship and vulnerability. I am thankful for their passions, even though I really hate sports. I am thankful for their games of Trivia Crack and their off-key, or totally awesome or somewhere in between, voices worshipping our God in Somalian. I am thankful for hiking up a mountain with them, and being able to cry in front of them. I am thankful for the leadership of my pastor and his sweet wife (basically the cutest couple ever), both of whom I admire and look up to so much. I am thankful of new friends and mentors and a new brother in Christ.
I am thankful for refugees, and their love. I am thankful for community gardens, where they can go and be good at something, because once upon a time they were engineers or politicians and now they live in a place where they can’t speak the language and are scared. I am thankful for Reach the Nations, the church we worked with, who is indeed reaching people from all nations, which we are all called to do as believers in Christ. I am thankful for prayer walks and home visits, even though it was hard.
I am thankful that I learned that even though this is not where I want to be as a person, like I don’t want to be struggling with that which I am now, that God made me this way at this time for a reason and I can still work to glorify Him as this person I am. I am thankful for Kristie for help showing me that.
I am thankful for a God that loves so intently, and for a place where, for a whole week, I saw God everywhere I looked. It’s so much better than anything else I could ever see, even the signs of Spring or a semester drawing to a close.
Thank you, Lord. You are so good.
I cannot wait to go back. But, the other thing I learned is, that I don’t have to go back to be learning and pouring into people and loving my family in Christ and seeking the poor, aliens, the lost, the sad, the hopeless, the abused, the lonely, the broken, my father, and brothers and sisters in Christ.
And I love that a lot.
Happy Spring. Have a great Tuesday.
