"..lovers bold in broken places."

Sunday, March 16, 2014; 12:54pm

I’m struggling with how to begin summarizing this trip into a couple paragraphs, but I think it only makes sense because most things that we experienced this week could only be felt. Words cannot even do the stories we heard, service we participated in, and people we met justice. To encompass everything I personally felt and was a part of would require a novel, so I hope to reiterate the lessons and message I received from this experience to the best of my ability.

If I had to title the story of the prison justice scene in Texas that was played out for me this week I’d call it Breaking Down the Walls. The stories we heard had commonalities through cycles of brokenness, pain, mistakes, loss, regrets, abandonment, rejection, but there was still light from a combination of joy, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption, and most importantly: hope. One of the speakers we heard, Jim Brazzil, was a Chaplain for the prison executions in a few different states. Throughout his career, he had witnessed and did his best to comfort 155 people as their lives ended on death row. He compared the way we do things as a society to putting up walls. We separate good and bad, prisoners and free men, us and them. With that, we allow ourselves to only recognize what we see in front of us, and what we see is what (and who) is on our side of the wall- all others are forgotten. As an execution chaplain, Jim’s job was to see all sides to the story and bring others together to potentially form an understanding of “the other side” and open eyes to the fact that we’re still dealing with real people here. Far too often when we are allowed to forget about the other side, we view our side as the only side. This rings true not only in the criminal justice system, but also in everyday life for you and me. And it starts small with lowering expectations for kids graduating high school, women and the wage gap, people struggling with mental illnesses who only see suicide as a way out, racial minorities in predominantly white or “higher status” professions, and so many more social justice issues. We have been raised and conditioned into “our place in society” and typically know that as the only way- never believing that we could join people on the other side of our wall. Naturally, I cannot speak for each and every individual, but I do know that there is hope beyond what we have been told. There are bigger and better things out there for us. We are both the victims and the heroes of our own and our neighbors’ realities. Unless we can see past the one-sided picture painted for us, we will not be able to build up a world and foster a global community that values every human being created in it.

This Texas ASB trip for me was the first of many to come, as I know that I will be applying to participate in future trips. I met an incredible group of students who break for the broken, have a thirst for knowledge, a hunger for adventure, and a passion for people like I’ve never seen before. And this is what I truly feel we are here for.

It’s about those taken-for-granted moments getting to know the little things about each other like Molly’s obsession with purple or how much Lydia loves Jesus, sitting around until midnight answering conversation cards laughing at Kate Wehby tell us all how she’d love to join a family of whales or how Chris imagines heaven would be a pretty chill place, rolling our eyes at Abby’s #hashtagTrinity moments, spiritually connecting over the painfully difficult desire to throw our toilet paper in the toilet when we know we can’t due to the church’s plumbing issues, listening to Johannah talk about her 5 year old daughter Jolie and how she wants to take her fishing when Johannah gets out of recovery, begging Jim to play guitar for us and turning it into a concert entitled “Jim Jams”, or sitting in a circle with our eyes closed feeling taps, pokes, and sometimes unnecessarily extensive massages from people giving us silent affirmations for influencing them, being a leader, making them laugh, or giving others hope. Texas ASB was an experience, to say the least. I could go on forever, but you guys get the point. I think we accomplished what we came to accomplish this time, but there is a world of service yet to be tackled. I have faith in everyone I met to be those hands and feet of love, to touch those who’ve never been hugged, to plant seeds of hope, and shine light in places of darkness. This is the bittersweet end of our weeklong adventure in Huntsville, Texas, but for most of us… this is only just the beginning of a life dedicated to changing things.

#ISUAB_MTO

“We are only asked to love, to offer hope to the many hopeless. We don’t get to choose all the endings, but we are asked to play the rescuers. We won’t solve all mysteries and our hearts will certainly break in such a vulnerable life, but it is the best way. We were made to be lovers bold in broken places, pouring ourselves out again and again until we are called home.”