Once upon a time, there was a girl who had a lot of dreams and lived like her days were too precious and had to be filled with all good things. She was on the brink of making big decisions about the future, as a soon-to-be college graduate. All spring semester, she made plan after plan about what she wanted to do next.
She dreamt of MCC SALT, the program that would send her to some obscure corner of the world, where she would hold foreign babies, probably teach English, learn another language, immerse herself in a beautiful culture. Support letters, visas, adventures were on her mind.
Then she was accepted and invited to go to India. And in good conscience, maybe without adequate reasoning, she said no.
She applied to work with Church World Service in Lancaster and World Relief in Baltimore, with the hopes of being inducted into the world of refugee resettlement. She imagined herself shaking hands with welfare workers and social service agents, meeting families for the first time at the airport, working long hours, and returning to a small apartment where she would eat hummus and pita by herself. No.
She applied for Mennonite Voluntary Service. The benefits were good and, with adventure still on her mind, why not get a placement in a new part of the United States, meet new people, but still be close enough to afford flying home for Christmas? The application process went through and she crossed her fingers, waiting for a placement she wasn’t sure she would get.
So she also completed an application for Americorps, hoping that she would get her dream job: working at the International Institute of Eerie, PA with refugees, creating and implementing a health and wellness program for refugee families. It seemed too good to be true, and eventually it was.
The girl decided to take some days to clear her head the summer following college. She went on a roadtrip with her best friend and, when camping one night, turned off her phone because of the low battery. The next day when she turned it on again, she had missed a call from an unknown number. She listened to a voicemail from a woman named Teresa from the International Institute who read her application and was inviting her to come join them in August. And could she please call her back. Pleased, the girl called her back on the road, somewhere between middle-of-nowhere Georgia and middle-of-nowhere Georgia. And Teresa was so sorry because, only five minutes before the girl called, she asked someone else to fill the position because she didn’t hear back from the girl. Crushed, the girl left a lot of tears on the sidewalk of Broad Street in a town called Monroe, right beside a used bookstore where she had bought two books for twenty cents only moments before the call. She missed this one on a technicality, it seemed.
Later that night, MVS had emailed her with four incredible placement options: case management positions in Kansas, Indiana, and two towns in Texas. Also later that night, she went to an incredible intentional community and met a man who invited her to come and work and live with Burmese refugees, teach English, and work on a farm. Options were coming out of the girl’s ears.
But soon she returned to Harrisburg, where she moved into a really needy community and started to fall in love with the people around her: the little boys playing on the sidewalks, the woman she passed each morning who shook with some sort of drug addiction, the men from different African countries who sit on the stoop on her block, discussing all things important and political. She fell in love with the broken glass that glistened on the sidewalks, making it challenging and game-like to walk around the neighborhood. She loved the refugees around her, two wonderful friends for roommates, her brother, sister, and brother-in-law only a short bike ride away. Her church was within walking distance and she couldn’t understand why, when she dug for potatoes or sat in the herb garden at the farm where she was starting to volunteer, made her want to commit like farmers commit. It doesn’t take a few weeks to grow something important or delicious or green; sometimes it takes months (she won’t say that it takes years...she is still working through commitment issues). A few more weeks of the summer was not enough to show this girl how to be a good neighbor in this neighborhood where they needed good neighbors. She was only waking up to who she was here, how she thrived and grew here, why it was magnificently challenging and heartbreakingly beautiful to be here. She was not going to pass through this Calcutta without giving of herself in ways that required sacrifice, frustration, investment, and a great deal of love that only comes from Jesus. She had made a promise years before that she would go wherever God led, which, she is now realizing, could mean staying. So, she sent emails with this truth to people she might disappoint and made the difficult decision.
Unemployed (or funemployed, depending on who you ask), the girl decided to stay put for a while, entirely uncertain what God will have her do here, but trusting that there is a plan, even if that plan is for her to put aside a handful of her glorious dreams for a time, take up her cross, and find meaning in what is before her.
