It’s the last week of this summer of Mission Immersion, and on this Tuesday night after program, this group was heading to the Marble Slab to grab some ice cream, and invited my fellow Intern Will, and myself to join. When we walked into the ice cream shop, our adult leader decided to cover the entire group and then the other four people in front of us in line. The first of these was a young man, whom appeared to be in his late teens, early twenties. He had just purchased a cone, and then once he found out it was covered, asked if he could get some ice cream to accompany it, as he only had enough money to get the cone. After receiving his cup of butter pecan, he took a seat at a table under a window, and a few of our youth and an adult sat down and started chatting with him.
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The world we live in today is overrun by desires and notions that we must all live the perfect life and have everything figured out. If we mess up then we become outcasts by our peers, our friends, the media, or even society. We are told that not reaching these goals are caused by not working hard enough, not wanting it, that we are lazy, or that we intentionally did it to ourselves. We have turned into a world where egocentrism thrives as a result of this. As a culture, we masquerade in cities where the facades are beautiful but all the while the interiors are crumbling. This is how many of us live our lives, lost in the haze of the mountain just trying to get through another day without falling apart. How then can we find ourselves if we don’t even know where we are?
The following is a reflection by an Asheville Youth Mission participant, Cate O’Malley, who came to AYM this summer with her group from Sugar Creek Presbyterian Church in Kettering, Ohio. She shared this with her congregation after returning from Asheville. So, I’d like to start out with the question “What are you hungry for?” And I don’t mean what do you want for lunch after church today, but what are you HUNGRY for? Like you’ve heard already, one of the work sites we went to was the Lord’s Acre where their motto is “Everybody is hungry for something and everybody has something to give”. Some of us are hungry for new adventures and experiences. Some of us are hungry for assurance and affirmation from others. Some of us are hungry to get out there and serve.
Here is video and spoken word poem written, performed, and produced by one of our Memphis Youth Mission interns. May these words and images inspire all of us to be more welcoming and open to where God is calling us to be.
Imagine a whiteboard. A big one, extending far beyond the limits of your sight. Just a big ole blank white board, waiting to be filled in. Zoom out, and see all the whiteboards, exactly the same humongous size as the first, filling up space in a grid of colored marker and explosions of thought on erasable canvas. Whiteboards as far as you can see, with words and symbols and blobs, some with moving pictures, others playing music, some connected by strings of yarn and others covered in sticky notes. And one, off in a corner,blank. A marker sits on the tray, uncapped. But nothing is drawn.
There is a certain amount of times a person can be asked “What exactly are we doing today?” before they become comfortable with not always having a concrete answer. In a position of leadership (at least for me), the ideal circumstance is knowing exactly how the day is going to go. I’ve grown up wanting to know the day-by-day itinerary for every mission trip, every family vacation, and every other adventure I’ve ever been on. It’s comforting to feel like I’m in control of every detail of what I’m doing. However, over the past month of work with AYM, I have had to let go of some of those tendencies.
Over the course of this year, and especially since joining the staff of YMCo., I have heard a lot about being “intentional” with my actions. That could mean praying intentionally, having intentional conversation, or sometimes it means being intentional about the way that I explain an activity. Yet, somehow the term has always felt a bit unnecessary to me. Don’t we always have a reason for doing what we do—otherwise, why do it? It wasn’t until my first week as an AYM intern that I learned the real importance of intentionality.
This summer, and for the following school year, we will be exploring the theme, “Creating Space.” It’s a theme that we think will be very relevant to youth, to their experience here at Youth Mission Co, and the world.
Here is a statement from several youth at Trinity Presbyterian Church of Charlotte.
As a student at Presbyterian College, a professor taught me the phrase, “You cannot be a Christian alone.” Whether this was an original quote or simply borrowed words, the phrase stuck with me after graduation, and as I began my year serving as a Young Adult Volunteer in Asheville. I first began to fully grasp its meaning during my first few months here. I was given the task of working in a new worshipping community where I didn’t quite understand some of the viewpoints of the members there, and I began to struggle with what God was calling me to do. It was during a phone conversation with a friend from college that I was reminded that, “We cannot be Christians alone.” She said to me, “What good is faith if it is only lived out among those who look, think, believe, and act like us?” Little did I know, she was setting me up for a life-changing 7 months working for Asheville Youth Mission.
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