Month: September 2017

We Are Marked

One of my chances to write the travel blog from my July trip back to Lebanon…

Traveling with The Outreach Foundation on these ministry experiences as I have for the last seven years, I have learned many things. One of them is that you are part of a team, and even though we begin as strangers, very quickly we bond into a family knowing we have a common Father. Tonight we had the privilege of coming into deeper community with each other as we reflected on the day. Pam Hillis of First Presbyterian Tulsa led our devotion around Romans 12:9-16. In my travel NRSV Bible, the heading says, “Marks of the True Christian.” To paraphrase, we share our gifts, we lift each other in faith, we love and we serve. Those marks should reflect our lives in Christ, marked for us on his head, hands, feet and in his side. This is our model, and today we experienced those same marks on those we came to be with.

The focus of our day was Our Lady Dispensary (OLD) in Beirut, a ministry founded in the days of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). In a small second-floor office in a poor area of Beirut, fifty years worth of war refugees have found their way to Christ’s hands and feet in action. For the past seventeen years it has been lovingly and excellently run by Grace Boustani, a Lebanese social worker and sister in Christ. With limited resources, limited even more by donor fatigue due to the length of the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, she serves some 500 families looking for help with food, medicine, rent and trauma healing.

Our team of nine women gathered in a circle with Grace and Rola, who has been trained to lead trauma healing workshops with a Bible Society curriculum revised for the Middle East context. We heard of children in a pilot week-long camp who arrived on a Monday with no smiles, no words and no hope, and left on Friday as engaged young people, speaking, playing and using their own hands to draw pictures to share their stories.

We met two young women, one Iraqi, one Syrian, each the mother of three, each having experienced the flight-in-the-night story that is so common among refugee families. It is cruel and heartbreaking, and yet here at Our Lady Dispensary these two young women opened up to share with us. And in their stories is where I find Pam’s scripture so perfectly reflected today. Even in the brokenness of lives torn apart by loss and war, these two were in our midst sharing their gifts, lifting us in faith by their acts of love and service.

Sweet R. from Iraq was pregnant with her third child when forced to flee in the night with but a half-hour’s warning as ISIS moved in. Four days later in the temporary sanctuary of her church, she gave birth to her son, now two years old. Coming to Lebanon, her family found OLD and received some help. Not just willing to receive, she has since become Grace’s chief volunteer for the Iraqi refugees served by OLD, serving as a liaison for the families and OLD. She does whatever she can around the office to help, including making coffee and cleaning. How is it possible for this sweet young traumatized mom and wife to be able to serve out of her situation? A woman just waiting for hope whose prayer is “God, just open a door for us”? The answer we experienced is that she is marked: she uses her gifts, her faith lifts those around her, she loves and she serves.

Our new friend Y. is from Syria with another story of loss. So much loss for such young women! High rents. Menial labor for a husband if he can find it. How do you cope? And yet, when she made her way to the OLD neighborhood and Grace’s outstretched hands she found something different than she had ever known. In her words, “The day I started to know God, I started to hope and everything changed.” Y. met Jesus and came to know him through reading God’s word, going to church, and is now a Christian. Her husband has also accepted Christ. One day when she returns to angry parents in Syria who do not want to accept this she will repeat what she has already told them: “Open the Bible and you will see the truth.” She is marked, and having shared those marks with her husband, will one day share them with the rest of her family.

As we reflected on the lives of these two young women tonight, Pam’s devotion brought us all back to the same place: we are the Body of Christ, and that body is marked. May those marks be seen in us all and shine God’s glory as brightly as the marks on Grace, R. and Y.

Incarnational Witness in Washington, D.C.

I was looking through some old files on my computer recently. Not finding what I was looking for, instead I found this gem from 2005, one of my best trips to Washington, D.C., with Jana. I’ve just got to share it! What follows is a series of stories and emails between me and another hunger advocate named Tracy Young. They remind me of how God calls us to minister out of the broken clay pots of our lives, and just what a gift I have in a sister who never gave up on me, even as others might have given up on her. She teaches me still. Every. Day.

***

This article is reprinted with the author’s permission from “The Advocate,” a publication of the Office of Social Justice and Hunger Action of the Christian Reformed Church, July, 2005

A Glimpse of Hunger No More

By Tracy Young

He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. Rev. 21:4

I saw her shuffling awkwardly across the American University campus, her body all elbows and right angles, her chin tucked stiffly into her neck. Her movements were rigid, stilted and slow. I wondered if it hurt to be curled up like that, to disappear into oneself.

At One Table, Many Voices: A Mobilization to Overcome Poverty and Hunger, I joined 600 other Christians in Washington, D.C. on the American University campus to work to end extreme poverty and hunger in our nation and the world. About thirty people from Christian Reformed churches, agencies, and related colleges came together to discuss our efforts to overcome poverty – as individuals, as churches, as schools, as communities. We participated in workshops, listened to speakers, worshipped, lobbied, prayed and learned together.

But the most striking moment for me in Washington did not come in the shadow of the Capitol building on lobby day. It did not come during the round of excellent speakers, during my conversations with the people I met, or even at the National Cathedral during the Interfaith Convocation that mourned hunger and demanded action as a storm pounded the stained glass with rain and lighting made the microphones fizz. It came, of all places, at the French Embassy while I greedily shoveled mushroom canapés into my mouth.

One Table participants piled into the not-so-elegant mass transit of school buses and shuttled to the très élégant French Embassy one evening to celebrate the countries who had become eligible for the US’s Millennium Challenge Account program. Our entertainment for the evening was an African dance troupe from the local Market 5 Gallery.

Market 5 came into the room, all drums and joy, moving like people don’t move where I worship, shouting and beaming and raising the hair on our arms. We were entranced by the energy in front of us, clapping and bouncing our bodies to the beat. As the troupe ended an impressive choreographed sequence, they motioned for the crowd to come into the circle and start dancing with them. People poured in, laughing and dancing, letting the rhythms lift their feet.

And as I watched this gleeful group, I saw a couple of the troupe members move to the side of the circle and bring back with them the woman I saw laboring across the AU campus. I watched as they gently guided her into the circle, right into the middle of it all, held her hands and carefully danced with her, stepping their feet lightly as she swayed and bobbed and shuffled, ever so slightly, back and forth. She was smiling, and they were smiling, and the drums were beating, and I think it was as close to a picture of heaven as I’ve ever seen.

I had only noticed this woman because she had trouble walking. The troupe noticed her and saw a woman who could dance. They went straight to her with no thought that she couldn’t or shouldn’t and invited her in, someone who had probably been overlooked, or ignored – by people like me. By the time the group pulled a participant in a wheelchair into the circle to dance, I was uncomfortably stuffed with shame, joy and too many mushrooms. What a strange combination.

One table, many voices. The dance troupe got it. Everyone, all shapes, sizes, ages, ethnicities and abilities were invited into that circle, invited to that table. Everyone moved a different way, but they all moved together.

As I continue my own work for justice, I’m going to remember that moment. It reminds me that God uses us, unlikely, imperfect vessels to do great things. God uses the timid to speak to the powerful and a teenager to carry the Savior. Even with our heavy feet, God sees that we can dance.

That moment also reminds me of my own sin. How often do I look at image-bearers of God and see only what I consider their weakness? Their homelessness, their poverty, their shortcomings. I don’t like to ask that question. It’s much easier to turn a critical eye on someone else.

But what I take from that moment most of all, and what I’ll remember when I’m discouraged with this hard work called “doing justice,” is that surreal feeling of the in-between. I caught a precious slivered glimpse of the deep and far and wide, pulsing open just so, with each beat of those drums. I saw hunger no more, justice for all, grace, peace and love radiating out the toes of some twirling children of God.

***

July 23, 2005 – Jana shared this article with me when she received it in the mail from David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World and just another friend of Jana’s. I cried while trying to read it to Steve and immediately sat down to email the author so she could hear the “rest of the story.”

Dear Tracy,

I just finished reading your article “A Glimpse of Hunger No More” in The Advocate, and it moved me to tears.

The article was sent to my sister Jana Prescott from David Beckman with this note, “I never see you in the unflattering way that this young woman first saw you. But I think you will be encouoraged to know what a powerful witness to Christ’s life you were to her.”

I wanted to thank you for the moving way you shared the gospel and our call in this article. For Jana’s life is the witness that brought me back to Christ, and also to his call for justice and love.

Jana was injured in a car/train accident 22 years ago in Colorado, where she worked at a Presbyterian camp in her beautiful Rocky Mountains. A very independent woman, you can imagine what this did to her life.

She would tell you that Feb 14, 1983, is her second birthday, and indeed, we celebrate it each year as a second chance at life.I was with her in Washington as I’ve been privileged to be most years since 1991 for the BFW event. (If you saw her walking alone, it’s because I got sick in the cold of the auditorium, and she even brought food over to me in the dorm! Quite a feat with her impaired balance. ) I’ve learned a lot there and have found my voice, even as she has lost hers. She does dance for joy every day! And I might say that even though I’m the “talker” on Lobby Day, her voicelessness always speaks more profoundly to why we’re there and who we’re there for. We are
voices for the voiceless.

So, thank you. I hope you two meet some day. Don’t be surprised if you hear from her.

I’m hoping it’s okay if I reprint your article in our church newsletter: West Hills Church, Omaha, NE.

Dancing for God with heavy feet, but not a heavy heart,

Julie Prescott Burgess

***

Dear Julie,

Thanks so much for your email. I was actually a little nervous that this article would make its way back to “the woman” – who I now know is Jana! At first, I wasn’t sure if I should write the piece at all. I did not want to hurt the feelings of or embarrass the person I was writing about, and that was my primary concern. I didn’t want to exploit her difficulty for the sake of writing an article. But also, it’s really hard to write about your own brokenness and tell a thousand people about it. At any rate, I hope I did the right thing by sharing the story.

I hate to think that I can be so unfair or so dismissive without even a thought as to what I’m doing…what a soft prejudice, what a quiet little judgement I made about your sister. It just snuck into my brain without any hoopla and sat there until God decided it was time to send in the drums and a lesson.

I hope that Jana will forgive my shortsightedness, and know that she has been a participant in a great, grace-filled gift to me. I’m so glad to know her name and her story and feel blessed to have had her life intersect with mine, even for that brief moment.

Please do feel free to reprint the article in your newsletter.

Blessings,

Tracy

Tracy Young
Social Justice Network and Communications Assistant
Office of Social Justice and Hunger Action
Christian Reformed Church in North America