Reflections from two youth group members

BCMC youth group members: Cris Nelson, Joe Kondziola, Emily Harder, Leah Bartel, Ben Kreider, Kevin Leary, John Bergen, Megan Leary, Chris Wagoner, Rebecca Trumble.
Leaders: Ruth R. Harder, Cliff Dick, Marlene Ewert, Miriam Regier. Photo provided.

In July the youth group from Bethel College Mennonite Church (BCMC), North Newton, Kan., travelled to Evansville, Ind., to volunteer for a week at Patchwork Central, a community center working with children in art, gardening, singing and storytelling. It is also a Mennonite Voluntary Service site.

The following two articles are adapted from reflections given by two youth group members at a worship service at BCMC:

Ben Kreider’s reflection:
Something happened our last night in Evansville. It all started around midnight. The adults had gone to sleep and we youth were still up.

We gathered in a room and went around the circle of friends —person by person —and gave both affirmation and constructive criticism to each one.

We spoke of personality and behavior, things that inspired us and things that ticked us off, things we were saddened by and things that brought us joy. Wisdom and truth were spoken and it was wonderful to hear and to respond. By hearing everyone’s perspectives on each other we gained new insight not only into the person being spoken of, but also into the speaker.

I saw others in a new light after knowing how they see me. The wise thoughts of one prompted more wise thoughts from the rest.

Those awake that night caught a glimpse of the Kingdom of God and the Church. Perhaps we did not just catch it, but we also participated in it. We in that circle care for and love each other, enough that we will tell one another when something needs changing or is a hurtful behavior. We pushed each other to live up to our words and to be consistent in all our
actions. The important thing is that we pushed each other to make change, or at least envisioned it. We the youth, we the congregation, and we the Church form a circle of accountability. This must continue and grow, especially in small groups talking late into the night, but also in the much larger Church.

But before we critiqued we encouraged, thanking one another for all the good things each one does. The group brought out the best in everybody and made it known for all to hear. It was affirming to hear what in me inspired others. I was inspired when I heard friends bring out the commendable that I had failed to notice in each person. I saw good things in myself that I had never seen before. I think we all did. All of us offered knowledge that brought new layers of depth and understanding to our group and to ourselves.

It was refreshing that a discussion such as this was activated with a group of high schoolers, of peers. Maybe it is a sign of the way our youth group has grown in the past years, the closeness we feel, our willingness to speak our mind and our acceptance for each other. It was a wonderful thing to not only see but to be a part of.

Many of us hope to actually be the Church and be followers of Jesus.

It isn’t just going to happen for us as individuals, or if we are complacent. But it will happen with small groups of people who dearly love each other and want to make some good change. We will be the Church through communal prodding and affirmation, harsh words of prophecy and soft words of comfort, calls to action and calls home.

The step that follows an evening of words is a day of work. This is something with which we will always struggle. The challenge to me and the challenge to us as a community of believers is to walk the path we believe in. Our life for a week in Evansville was a walk down that path.

Every day we got up and we walked, because we had a community to listen to, talk with and join together in action.
John Bergen’s reflection:
I left for our Evansville trip three days after returning from a two week trip to California, Oregon and Washington with my family. After two weeks enjoying the beautiful scenery of the redwoods and the Cascades, I found the same reverence toward nature displayed at Patchwork Central as was displayed in the many national parks we visited along the west coast.
The people at Patchwork worked tirelessly to try and provide the children of the neighborhood and the neighborhood itself with a healthy community and to try and teach them healthy lifestyles. These children, and in fact, many of us, have grown up knowing the world of McDonalds and Walmart, of food that comes in neat little packages with neat little preservatives and unnatural chemicals. Against this backdrop, Patchwork works hard to teach the kids about making healthy choices and being healthy and helpful citizens.

This is not an easy job. Many of the kids were in desperate need for attention, and enjoyed our company immensely. One little boy, Gabe, would talk off hand about his mother’s 9 mm pistol and the amount of drinking that went on his family. He would stay after all the rest of the children went home, up until we made him leave and go back to his house. It took all of us together sometimes to convince him that he couldn’t come up into the house with us, and should go home. Other kids were just out of control, running off into the middle of the meeting circle until a volunteer dragged them, sometimes quite literally in the case of Cris Nelson, back into place.

Many of these kids were from homes which offered them no attention and little love, and you could see they enjoyed being at Patchwork, where every volunteer and every worker was willing to sit and spend some time with them, or was just as willing to play a game a ping-pong.

As we took communion with the congregation for their Sunday evening service, I was reminded of Jesus’ miracle of turning water into wine. In this same way, Patchwork has worked hard to transform a poor and dangerous community into one where, for at least a few hours every day, the children can find safety and comfort.

As I thought some more about this and about the miracle of the water into wine, I thought of two of my favorite quotes, one from one of my favorite authors: Fantasy author Terry Pratchett. In one of his novels, God has descended onto earth in the form of a tortoise, and is speaking to someone. The tortoise remarks that the miracle of Jesus turning water into wine in an instant is no more impressive than water being turned into wine normally, through the processes of photosynthesis, and the growing of grape plants and human ingenuity. Because, as we learned on the trip from a reading by the mystic Meister Eckhart, everyone and everything is full of God, and everyone and everything is a miracle of God.

This brings me to my second quote, which I didn’t actually read until this last week. It comes from Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book were required to read for Honors English III. In the novel, the author, Zora Neale Hurston, describes humanity this way: “When God made Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. The angels got jealous and chopped him into a million pieces, but he still glittered and hummed. So the angels ground humanity into dust, but each piece of dust glittered and sang. So the angels covered the dust in mud. Mud is deaf and blind, and the dust pieces called out to each other, in vain.”

Patchwork Central tries to share this dream, tries to spread the message that absolutely everyone and everything is holy. They teach the children that everything is holy, and that everything should be treated with care and respect, as you (will/have seen) in our children’s story today. That’s the message I took from the week at Patchwork: that everything has a piece of God inside them, and everyone is holy.