City Lights (Part 1)

Hey there. :)

This post is about my spring break, which I spent here in the STL.

A month or so before break, Mario, my friend who's working on planting an InterVarsity chapter here at UMSL, told me about a spring break program called City Lights, which is through InterVarsity. Basically, students from around the country stay at a church here in St. Louis (my church, actually) and do inner-city missions sorts of things. I knew I wasn't going home on spring break, I needed to find something to keep me occupied (pretty much everything on campus shut down and everyone was gone), and it sounded really great, I decided to attend. Man, I got more than I expected! I was so blessed, and I want to tell you about it! :)

Day 1:

This first day, Mario picked me up at the dorm, then we went to pick up the only other student from UMSL who went. His name was Chris, and he's another freshman. We showed up at my church, New City Fellowship to register. The church actually used to be a school for the deaf, so in one of the buildings there are some dorms, which are where the 55 students that were there for the week stayed. After registering and unpacking a bit, we had a brief orientation (ie; this is your lanyard, this is your schedule, don't do anything stupid...you know. :) ) and hopped on some busses to go on a tour of the city. I had seen some of these places before, but having Gerry and Shari (the leaders of the program) talk about the different landmarks and areas of the city from a different perspective was really interesting. Their prayer for us for the week was that our eyes would be opened to God's truth in the city of St. Louis, just like Elisha prayed for the servant in 2 Kings 6. The truth that they especially focused on this week was the fact that God identifies with and deeply cares for the poor, needy, homeless, alien, widow, and orphan, and expects us to do the same.

Gerry and Sharie narrated as we drove down the street that divides St. Louis city from St. Louis county: Skinker. They explained how St. Louis City seceded from the county when it was still a thriving city. Many richer, white people lived in the city, and didn't want the taxes they paid to go to things out in the county, so the city became a different entity. As time went on, African American people began to move into the city, and as racism was still quite alive and well, many of the white people began to move out into the county, a phenomenon called "white flight." As the city lost much of its tax money with the richer white families, it also contributed in part to the deterioration of the city that is present today. St. Louis is called "the most dying city in America," and in certain parts of the city, you can especially see it...just by looking at all of the abandoned and dilapidated buildings. The legacy of racism is still very much part of the brokenness of this city. On Skinker street, the houses on the county side of the street sell for much, much more than the houses on the other side of the street....just because the others are in the city.

Our first stop on the tour was the Basillica. The Basillica is a beautiful Catholic cathedral in the city. It has the largest collection of ecclesiastical mosaics in the entire world, and the ceilings are covered with them. The building is absolutely breathtaking, inside and out. It's monumental...the center dome is 14 stories tall. No picture that I have can reflect it accurately. What is interesting is that it was built around the turn of the century by poor immigrants. It was amazing to me that of all things people with not much to spare would do with their money, they would choose to build such a glorious place of worship. It was obviously incredibly important to them.

Something interesting, however, is that at the entrance to the sanctuary are three of these small poor boxes. The contrast between the grandeur of the sanctuary and the inconspicuousness of these receptacles was actually rather stark. To be honest....I'm not sure how I feel about the Basillica. On one hand, it beautifully demonstrates the immensity of our God...but on the other, it makes me wonder if it doesn't miss the point, at least a little bit. I don't know.

Next we visited the Soulard Market. It is a semi-open air market in downtown St. Louis. Gerry and Sharie gave us each a dollar and told us to go buy as much food as we could with it...and barter to get it. The food would be given out to needy families in the church the next day. They reminded us that St. Louis is the city with the 2nd highest number of refugees in the entire United States. This type of market is often one of the only things that is vaguely familiar to them, as much of the rest of the world doesn't have such things as grocery stores. After two flatly unsuccessful attempts at bartering, I traded my dollar for a healthy grocery bag of potatoes:

Our third stop on the tour was at a new church in one of the deadest areas of St. Louis. It is downtown. We learned about some of the problems and struggles they've had in starting the church, and we took a tour of the building.

Our last stop was Art Hill in Forest Park, one of the gems of this city. This park was built for one of the world's fairs around the turn of the centrury. Right about where this picture was taken, the entire Palace of Versailles was constructed for that fair...a feat not to be sneezed at. We had a beautiful vista of the skyline of St. Louis. Gerry asked us to just stop, look, and take a moment to pray for the beautiful and broken city:

Day 2:

This second day, we woke to the sound of drums in the hallway....yes, one of the staff used a large African drum to wake us, rather than a bugle. I have to say, it was probably just as effective. :) After waking, we had devotions, ate breakfast, and went to New City for the service. After this, groups of us were adopted by families from the church for lunch. My group was adopted by Mark and Kara. They were such a blessing to us and were so hospitable and kind. They also had several people from Africa staying with them, and we got to meet them at lunch as well. After lunch, we went back to the church, I played ultimate frisbee with some other students, and we had another orientation type of meeting. They then rounded us up in the auditorium and we watched several movies/documentaries. The first clips were from a movie called Beyond Borders, a Hollywood movie about a woman who goes to help refugees. We then watched a short documentary from the UN about a refugee camp in the Congo. That was very interesting because I heard about refugee camps, but never really seen what one might be like. The last movie was a documentary called God Grew Tired of Us, and I highly recommend it. It's about the "Lost Boys" of the Sudan, who were displaced to a refugee camp in Kenya. The story follows three of these boys who are chosen out of the camp by lottery to be transferred to the United States. It talks about their struggles with culture, their feelings about those left at home, what it's like to be an alien, and other such issues....I learned so much, and the documentary really made the struggles of refugees and aliens more personal for me.

Day 3:

This was our first work day. After devotionals and breakfast, we broke up into 10 or 12 different groups to work at different sites all over the city. Some people helped rebuild dilapidated buildings, some people helped clean the home of an elderly widow whose house was still filthy from a flood in the fall, and still others were teacher's assistants at one of the worst schools in the St. Louis public district. I was placed in a group of 7 to go work at a place called Oasis Ministries, which is a ministry that reaches out and gives aid to refugees. We arrived, met Mark and his wife Joanie, who started the ministry, and began by meeting them and getting to know them and the staff. It was beautiful to see the way they truly valued relationships and people over productivity, and it was a really good example for me to watch the way that they just loved people. Refugees would just walk in to the building, some looking like the homeless people you would see on the corner of the street or in a doorway in Portland...many of them not speaking much or any English, and Mark just walked up to them, gave them a huge smile, and greeted them like they were an old friend he hadn't seen in years. It was a radical sort of love that I hadn't seen much of before, and something I pray will someday manifest itself in me.

Here's some of my group and I in front of the Oasis truck:

After getting to know the staff a little bit, we went downstairs, where there was a room that looked a little bit like a Goodwill. They collect donated furniture, clothes, linens, and other things refugees might need, and just give them away when refugees come in and need something. The linens weren't organized at all, so that was our first task.

After finishing that, we got in a van and helped move some furniture into an Iraqi couple's home. Their names were Aseel and Ahmed, and they were very kind and very grateful. They spoke wonderful English...Aseel went to the university in Iraq and studied to be a schoolteacher. She taught for only about two months however....she told me she quit because she was too short and her voice wasn't loud enough. :) Then she was a secretary. Ahmed was an English teacher, and had helped the American soldiers in Iraq. After some time, his name was put on a list at a mosque of people to be killed, so Aseel and Ahmed fled the country and ended up here in St. Louis.

Oasis had had some land donated to it by a church in Illinois, just on the other side of the river. They bussed us over there, along with Aseel and another Iraqi woman, and we helped begin to cultivate some of this land into a farm that will be used to help feed refugees, and to hopefully provide the refugees with some supplemental income from the sale of the produce. We raked and hoed and planted and tilled until it was time to get back to the church.

That night, we studied Isaiah 58, which is about the Israelites. In the passage, God talks about how they fast and seem eager to know His ways, but they neglect the hungry, the wanderers, and the naked, and oppress their workers. God tells them that true worship is to loose the chains of injustice and meet the needs of the needy. As we studied, I thought about how committed I am to these things in my own life and how committed my church at home and the church in America at large is committed to these things as well. How often do we sing in church on Sunday, seek after God, and forget those people in our own lives, our own streets, and our own communities who are oppressed or in need? I was and am very humbled by this.

Anyway, this post is getting really long, and kind of word vomity....sorry if it's a little hard to follow. :) I think I will end here for now and write another installment about the rest of the week later.

I love you all very much....please join with me in prayer, if you would, for our eyes to be opened and our hearts to be changed. Lord, teach us to love as you love, and see people as you see them. Please break our hearts!

Have a blessed week, everyone.

As always,

Maren