On Sunday we celebrated the mission trip undertaken by youth and adult leaders in our congregation.  They have been, once again, to Alamosa Colorado where they worked with Habitat for Humanity and La Puente homeless shelter.

Our “sermon” was introduced by Cher Duys, our Director of Education and Youth Ministries (DEYM), followed by reflections from Eric Rohn, Kami Kirchberg, Kathleen Pender, and Will Hardy.  I hope you will take time to read these important words from our young friends.

Introduction by Cher Duys:

The youth have asked me to introduce, ‘Sharing our Stories’.

This is my seventh year trekking to Alamosa, Colorado in the San Luis Valley, a journey of Sabbath and of Service.

The valley houses the poorest counties in that state

where the average income is $15,000 per year. An agricultural area which draws many migrant workers to it’s fields.

A place where a UCC minister is the director of LaPuente, the homeless shelter which usually has beds for 40 people but during harvest time will find a space for over 100 hard working folks.

A place where Habitat for Humanity builds passive solar adobe homes for the families of which we’ve been involved now in 5 home builds.

This year 6 supportive adult leaders and 13 Enthusiastic, compassionate, extremely hard working and fun-loving youth lived out Jesus teaching, which calls us to serve people experiencing the affects of poverty, hunger and homelessness.

We worked with social justice seeking volunteers and staff:

At La Puente we worked with Tim Dellett, who had just completed a 2500 mile solo bike trip to raise money for Habitat for Humanity, inclusive of the Minnesota Habitat 500 mile ride which he will ride again next summer.

At Habitat for Humanity, we worked with Mike Murphy, who at the age of ‘70 something’ continues being the Habitat site foreman sharing his patience, kindness and love with the groups who come to serve.

We are always warmly greeted by the local Habitat chapter’s executive director Audrey Lui and Shasta, her young daughter. Audrey corresponds with us throughout the year and anxiously awaits our arrival each summer.

When I drive into the San Luis Valley I know I’ve entered sacred ground where I ask our group to be open to experiencing God and know with certainty that we will, especially through the life stories we listen to, the beauty of creation we are surrounded by and during our time of youth lead vespers. You will now hear and see stories from our time of living out our just peace covenant.

I will begin by sharing a reflection from Eric Rohn, our first trip alumni on the leadership team. Eric is a student teacher in Iowa so he’s unable to be here today.

Eric Rohn

Alamosa is a journey—one that I’ve taken 4 times, and hope to continue to take. There are few places I’ve been that are in such desperate need, and at the same time filled with such unwavering hope.

Journeying to Alamosa is stepping out of comfort and into a foreign world. Each trip for me has been filled with memories fond and heartbreaking, people who I’ve seen and will never see again. I’ve literally helped to put a roof over someone’s head, and fed a meal to someone who would otherwise go hungry.

There are few places where I’ve been so pushed emotionally and physically, and few times in my life where I’ve acted as selflessly as I have in Alamosa.

Cam Davidson and I sat with a man at La Puente who told us a story of his journey around the country—Hurricane Katrina, he said, had taken away everything. Yet he was still there smiling at us, praising Minnesotans for their good nature—and telling his story.

The first year I went to Alamosa, I met a man named Mike and we played guitar together. This year, again, I had the chance to trade songs with him—still there, maybe even a little healthier and happier than I remembered.

Those in Alamosa are like the plants in the desert, their roots run deep. Even when it’s tough they hold on—and as challenged as they are always ready to bloom when the rain comes.

I know I can’t fix everything, but I also know that every year in Alamosa I have made a difference. If only a small one. I know that as a youth these trips brought me to a place and space with myself and my peers that I could not have replicated any other way. As an adult coming back it only deepens that experience and expands it in others.

While returning is always hard, I know Alamosa will continue to be there. I know that there will always be a need and that I can always help. I know that my actions, no matter how insignificant, mean a better life for someone.

Kami Kirchberg

When I first stepped into La Puente I only knew that I was going to be making food at a homeless shelter but I had no idea how much work it would be or what kind of people I was going to meet. As we started to work in the kitchen I started to realize that it was not easy cooking for 50-60 people. Super-sizing everything was not an easy task! But periodically we would be interrupted from our intense cooking by people that came to the shelter asking us what was for dinner or thanking us for being there to serve them and as I heard some of the stories of the people there I became so amazed at how grateful everyone was even though they didn’t have very much.

I met Joe, one of the most memorable people from my trip, while I was at La Puente. He was a main supervisor at the shelter. He walked into La Puente when we were cooking with a giant smile on his face and his Minnesota t-shirt on even though he had never been to Minnesota. When we were eating there the day before, he had learned most of our names, so he came up and greeted us by name. Throughout the day he would come in and cheerfully talk to me and put a smile on my face.

From just being with Joe for a day I really liked him, but that night I learned something about Joe that made me like him even more. A few of the “Mission Trippers” were talking and saying how nice Joe was when Kathleen asked if anyone else remembered Joe eating at La Puente last year as a client and a few other youth said that had remembered that. After I heard that I started thinking about how cool it was that instead of Joe just using the soup kitchen and leaving as soon as he didn’t need it anymore, he stayed and decided to serve the people he had once eaten with. That same serving not only using attitude that Joe had was the same attitude that almost everyone else at La Puente and in Alamosa had. At La Puente there are jobs that need to be done after every meal like washing dishes that the staff USUALLY have no problem getting people to do because the people who go there have that serve others attitude. That attitude is one of the many reasons that la Puente was such a great place to work.

I know La Puente and Alamosa really made me appreciate the things I have as I am sure that it made everyone else who went on the trip appreciate what they have and I really hope that we get the chance to go again next year with the support of this congregation and I would also like to thank everyone who supported on this years trip – we really couldn’t have gone without your support.

Kathleen Pender

Alamosa, Colorado has a large number of people below the poverty line. It has a large number of people in need and a large number of people just trying to get by. Alamosa also has a large number of people willing to take time to serve within the community and improve the San Luis Valley step by step. Our youth group had the great opportunity to work with some of these individuals. Many of us were exhausted by the end of each day and especially by the end of the week. But some of these full-time volunteers who we met worked day after day in the dry heat and could always think of something else that needed to be done. They were people who kept going because they wanted to.

Habitat for Humanity is a great organization that brings people together. Many of the people we met and worked with, I’m sure we will remember for a long time. Mike, Tim, Audrey, Shasta, Dennis, the other Dennis, Dave, and Martha. Each person had their own talent or quality to bring. Mike with his knowledge of construction and ability to work with everyone so well. Tim with his compassion and … karate kicks, or Martha with her hospitality and delicious lemonade that made the painting go by so much faster.

No, we did not build an entire house while we were there. And no, we are not the design team from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, even though I saw the enthusiasm of Ty Pennington in all of us on the trip at some point. We did, however, stucco an entire house, install cabinets, build shelves for closets, dig up endless amounts of dirt in front of a house to make the ground even, paint the trim on the house that we stuccoed, including at least three coats of primer beforehand … and we built a fence.

As we talked about on our trip, it’s easier to focus on one thing at a time rather than getting caught up in the whole picture. This is something the volunteers from Habitat for Humanity would agree with. If someone is building a fence, they can’t expect every piece of wood to go up at the same time. It takes patience, which is something that demonstrated by many of those people willing to serve in Alamosa.

Will Hardy

There are certain moments in life when, almost automatically, one feels the need to take something out of the situation, some shred of wisdom, or careful reflection that might make life more easy to understand. Sometimes I liken life to being packed into an untidy rental van, blazing down the interstate, crowded densely together with your closest friends and mentors. What do you do with the time? You could look out the window at the passing scenery, read a book, listen to music, or just talk with friends for hours. Each will give you a different memory of the moment, and with it a different future. Sometimes people do things in the present with the future in mind, rather than their current fancies.

Such was the feeling I had standing in line with my group members at the La Foret campground in Colorado, preparing to enter the labyrinth, a weaving stone path nestled between the pine trees in the pristine mountain environment. Cher had told us that the labyrinth would take up to an hour to walk in complete silence, and we were encouraged to write about the experience in our journals after we were finished. Perhaps this, along with the quiet and meditative composition of my companions (something that was a rare occurrence throughout the trip) and the knowledge that we could be spending this valuable hour driving closer to Alamosa that gave me the impression that I should be using this experience to the best of its potential.

Upon entering the labyrinth I spent the time looking around the area from different angles. The labyrinth was large, about 50 feet in diameter, and the pathway snaked around it, slowly being drawn in and out until it reached the very center, where there were 5 or so benches where people would sit and write down their thoughts before heading back the other way. The circular, spiraling nature of the labyrinth allowed for many different views of the same place, and it occurred to me how complicated most areas are, and how a simple view could be transformed into a extremely complicated area by just adding new perspective. I also tried to imagine how ridiculous we’d all look if the labyrinth just wasn’t there, and we were simply a group of individuals walking very thoughtfully around in circles, apparently going nowhere. I loved how you could pass by someone by only a few inches, and they could still be ages ahead of you or behind you in their own journey through the labyrinth.

But it wasn’t long, maybe only a couple minutes, before my thoughts drifted away to times and spaces outside the labyrinth where I was walking. It had been a long summer up until that point, full of many events and it was at about that point that my life seemed stopped perfectly still, on some pinhead between the past and the future, and I was looking over it all, wondering where I would go, once the path wasn’t set in stone before me. My mind was far away through most of the journey toward the center and as I sat on the bench in the middle, examining the pebbles at my feet, I willed myself back to the present, something near impossible to do, given the amount of times I’ve had to do it. Often I’ll walk through the halls of my high school, or sit through a long and dull biology lesson and think to myself that I’m not really living a full life at all, but rather the same select, precious moments over and over and over again, inside my brain. It’s usually then that I’m conscious of the fact that I’ve missed what has been going on for the past five minutes or so, and try my hardest to haul myself back into the world outside of my head, but it’s such a cruel paradox: if you truly live every second in the present, not missing amazing moments that might come your way, you have no time for reflection, which is what gives the moments actual meaning.

Snap out of it, Will, I thought. Think of the amazing trees, or that piney smell. Think of something. Think of a metaphor. That’s what I was missing. This labyrinth definitely had an underlying meaning. That is what I needed to find. So as I walked back I speculated different meanings for the labyrinth. In order to give something else to stimulate my brain and my senses, I also tried to figure out the pattern in the labyrinth, see if it followed a certain pattern of lefts and rights and ins and outs in order to get to the center. It seemed to have 4 different quadrants, because it only ever turned on two different axis spanning out from the center. First you were in quadrant four, then you turned, then went from four to three, then back to four, then back to three, then on to two. I actually spent a good 10 minutes of slow walking dictating to myself what quadrant I was in, searching for a pattern. I was the scientist, and the labyrinth was the Big Question, the Great Unknown, and I was trying to solve it.

That was the meaning of the labyrinth! It was nature, a big mystery, and one could spend his or her time in it either admiring it’s beauty in ignorant wonder, or attempt to solve it, and then change it, make it better. A labyrinth is unchangeable though, I thought. That’s the problem with the metaphor. Well maybe it’s not about changing it, but just walking it the best way you can before your time is up. I was content with this thought as I left the labyrinth and went over to the campfire area with my journal. I tried to sketch the labyrinth from memory, using the observations I’d taken while walking it. I couldn’t do it. Oh well.

It was several days later when I was walking down the mountainside with Cher, coming back from our hike during our rest day between working with Habitat for Humanity and working at the La Puente shelter in Alamosa. She is a good person to talk with, that Cher. And I felt like I needed a talk, I had a lot on my mind and I wanted to see if another human being could make any sense of it, when I couldn’t. She asked me if I was having a good time, and was adjusting to Colorado after having spent the last 3 weeks directly before in England with my English friends. I said I was doing fine, but something else was bothering me. Every night, before we went to bed, we would have Vespers, a little ceremony in which every one talks about what they experienced in their day, and what they should keep in mind tomorrow, and what meaning they would take back with them to Northfield once it was all over. I heard so many people talking about “stretching their comfort zones” and “learning how to serve the less fortunate,” but I didn’t know what they were talking about. I hadn’t been “stretched,” I didn’t need to know how to “serve”. That was already in me. If that was what I was supposed to gain from this, I had failed. If I had taken anything from the mission trip thus far it was that there was a lot of work to be done, and someone had to do it, no matter what it involved, be it an afternoon of hard labor to stucco a single house, or a few minutes trying to screw in a shelf.

Cher understood this; she wasn’t disappointed at my horrible lack of profound personal growth. She said it was a good thing I wasn’t congratulating myself, that once I returned to Northfield I should feel dissatisfied with my work, and should continue doing my part to serve the community.

It wasn’t until later that I worked out my labyrinth problem. The labyrinth will always be long, and twisted, and confusing. There will be always people less fortunate than you. There will always be more work to be done. You will always have the option to spend your time however you want, and take from it whatever wisdom your mind can stretch and shape for you. But there are other people in this labyrinth. This is no personal journey, no path towards enlightenment; it’s just a question of seeing yourself a part of the stone and the earth as much as anyone else walking around you, and that if someone feels trapped or constricted in the endless twisting stones, reach out a hand. Free people, so they can truly appreciate the beauty of the labyrinth. And once they leave, they will leave feeling glad they walked it, and, if even for just a moment, managed to pass someone who cared enough to reach out to them in a time of need.

Prayer for August 31, 2008

This prayer is a favorite of the Mission Trip team — it was offered as they left on their journey, and when they returned, and was our closing at worship on Sunday …

May God lead us from this place and take us to where the spirit is living;

May God lead us to a new awareness of the poor and show us God’s home among them;

May God lead us to a new desire for justice and give us a glimpse of God’s kingdom being built;

May God fill our hearts with generosity and anoint us to be bearers of good news;

May God’s blessing be upon us as it is upon the poor,

and may we be shown what God wants us to do.  Amen.