Hope 4

Sarah and Ken Corson

This is part four of a blog series on building hope through remembering faith. Hope 1 Hope 2  Hope 3

The clay pot that was assembled from the shards of my alabaster jar, making up my life at SIFAT, was one where I "held the treasure and knew that the all-surpassing power was from God and not from me." (2 Corinthians 4).  My alabaster jar had been shattered, the fragments of my life in New York and my new life in Alabama were connected in such a way for maximum luminescence, the outpouring of the Presence in me "being clearly seen" because of my weakness.  

In preparing to write this blog, I called Sarah Corson, co-founder of SIFAT.  People like to ask the question, "Who is a role model for you." Let me introduce you to the answer that often rolls of my tongue. 

Sarah Corson's smile holds warmth and life.

We sat under a tree outside of the main office on the SIFAT campus.  I was still getting my barrings after our whirlwind move south mid-school year in a downpour.  I was surrounded by others my age who had come for a visit, for a challenge by their youth leaders. Sarah Corson spoke with conviction, her tanned skin and crown of white hair accentuating the riveting passion in her blue eyes as she told of the baby too weak to cry in her arms and the unnamed old man carrying mounds of Chiquita bananas on his back in Costa Rica. When the first hand accounts ended, she paused, looked at us with tears in her eyes and said, “Now that you know, you cannot keep on living as those who are ignorant.”  Her husband, Ken, got up and said, “To whom much is given, much is required. (Luke 12:48).  You have been given much, what is God requiring of you?"  For three years I lived among these dynamic people, learning from their sacrifice, learning to love Jesus with abandon.  Not only them, but God brought to our doorstep brothers and sisters from Rwanda, Pakistan, India, Bolivia, Ecuador, Haiti, and many other countries who came to train at SIFAT.  Two brothers from Rwanda were from two different tribes, and had a shared trauma that hurled them to the ground at a gunshot from one of the deer hunters in the Alabama woods.  Upon seeing each other at the SIFAT campus, they embraced, something they wouldn't have done in their homeland. One of many stories and experiences I reveled in.  I gathered in my mind the Christlikeness of these people, hoping the greatness of my God I saw in them would somehow grow in me. Like waves washing over my heart, the passion, the mission that drove the lives of these brothers and sisters seeped into the cracks in my jar and mingled with the growing faith, nourishing the tender longing in my heart to follow Jesus to the places of the world that were hurting.   

I remember the songs sung around a campfire at the simulated third world village, our hammocks hung behind us. The words from the song Faithful Men still ring in my heart all these years later: 

Verse 1

Come and join the reapers

All the kingdom seekers

Laying down your life to

Find it in the end

Come and share the harvest

Help to light the darkness

For the Lord is calling faithful men 

 

 

and Pass It On

"It only takes a spark to get a fire going..." 

Week after week a new high school youth group would come throughout the summer.  I was a junior camp counselor, leading work teams to dig a ditch, clear a hillside with machetes, pick blueberries, or make bricks.  I made deep friendships in every group as we worked, ate and washed up, worshiped, mud wrestled, swam in the stream, and learned about the needs of the world together.  

I remember how God carried me to and away from SIFAT for a very significant season of my life.  I remember how Sarah Corson and others spoke so passionately, fueling my own desire to live with abandon.  I remember the pictures seared in my mind of suffering people from Sarah Corson's stories.  I remember the paraphrase of Matthew 25 that hung in the cafeteria, where we fellowshipped daily during the three years I lived there and the two summers I returned as an adult to be a camp counselor. I remember how mission made itself real every day I went to the public high school I attended, and then returned to my SIFAT cacoon day after day. I remember how God gave me a Spirit filled body of believers in a local church that embraced all colors in a stubbornly segregated south, helping us to glorify God in all of his diverse beauty.  I remember how the disjointedness of my life at 13 became a beautiful new masterpiece that made me stand in awe of how God was stitching me together. I remember leaving America for the first time to travel to Ecuador at 16 to witness the work that a SIFAT graduate was doing with children in the outskirts of Quito and how that climactic experience ushered my family into another move back north. With that news, I had learned that saying goodbye also meant saying hello, and I was ready to see what God was going to do next, in Michigan. I remember driving From Alabama to Michigan in my deep blue 1980 Oldsmobile with my little sister by my side so we could start school before Mom and Dad joined us.  A whole new world it was, where the lawns would make an army sergeant happy with their timely watering systems and tip top hedging and regularity.  No unseemly clotheslines or a junk truck for parts parked in front yards.  No kudzu climbing telephone polls or solar water heaters with a bicycle powered pump bringing water up out of the stream on the side.

 Our new town held it's own kind of beauty, my vibrant sister who was fighting leukemia at the time, and my big brother with his delightful growing family.  Speak of role models, I guess that will be a remembering for another time. 

Introducing my new little family to my happy place in 2017, a month before Lydia joined us.

 

Hope 3

Family '84

This is part three of a blog series on building hope through remembering faith.  See previous posts for background. 

I knelt at the altar of a camp where my youth group was retreating after an invitation to break open our alabaster jar before Jesus. At 13, I was good at soccer.  I had been asked to be on the varsity team at the local public school (though I attended a private school).  I lived next door to my loving grandparents on our family farm and had deepening childhood friendships.  I felt I had to give God my family, friends, and soccer as my alabaster jar. Not long after that, my parents told me we were moving to Alabama from Upstate New York.  Our church family, New Life, was where I first asked Jesus to “drive my tractor.”  The analogy was given by Pastor Jerry.  He was close to our family, our farm being a place where a number of people had come to straighten themselves and their relationship with God out.  We were sent by our church, a true family, to Alabama, a place of American football (they hadn’t yet discovered my international sport) and a whole new culture to adapt to. We lived in a mission center called SIFAT…my jar had been broken. I remember how the decisions God gave me to make, as stepping stones on a journey, bolstered my faith and carried me closer to God’s heart. I remember how release became rejoicing, pouring out, a redefined plenty, season after season in my walk with God.

  

Mrs. McCaslin, my first teacher and a member of our church, with other teachers that made my first year at school super special!

 

New kind of plenty, one of my students, Lydia. '21

Hope 2

 

Helping Mommy '84

 

I was 10, seated at a lunch table with my classmates. Mrs. McCaslin was my first teacher apart from my mother.  I don’t know why she chose me that day.  She leaned over from the far end of the table, with all my classmates and their half-eaten lunches in between to ask me a question I have never forgotten:  “Christy, what do you want to be when you grow up?”  I had recently asked my mother what kind of people they needed in missions.  Putting it simply my mom said, "They always need nurses and teachers."  I heard myself responding to Mrs. McCaslin, “I want to be a nurse, teacher missionary.”  It was the first time I remember saying what I wanted to be. When I said it, I knew it was true.  I never really got the nurse part, but a teacher I am! I remember the teachers God used in my life, the moments they seized to ask me questions and teach me faithfully.  I remember how firmly that calling settled in my heart.
 

Loving Mommy before I became a mommy in Nigeria '15

 

 

Fighting for Hope

 I have been challenged to remember.  The kind of challenge that confronts a hopelessness that makes shadows stubbornly darken present joys.  Despite the beauty of my world, my children, my marriage, there is a cold settling, making me brittle to gracefully combat difficult situations. 

During our prayer meeting on Friday, I felt God was challenging me to confront my struggling hope with remembering faith. 

My Cameroonian Father, who knew me during a very rich time when God was speaking, moving, transforming me in drastic ways, was present during the prayer meeting. His prayer was for his “little Christy” and it drew me back to that season, where I lingered with God in the quiet place. 

The wife of the chaplain during my college years asked us to pray for college students during the prayer meeting, remembering my generation and how God called so many from Hope College at that time.  She then read from Psalm 77: 

“I will remember the deeds of the LORD;
Yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago
I will meditate on all your works
And consider all your mighty deeds.” 

Another sister, Rudy, we met when we were newly weds in Dallas, spoke the worlds, “Neither the present, nor the future,” coming from Romans 8, “nothing can separate us from the love of God.”  

No one in attendance knew the heart struggle I’ve been having, and the way God ministered to me through them was so tender and gracious of him.  I am going to write a blog series of remembrances. I will go through my story, and remember with you what God has done.