This was given during Wednesday Chapel at Union Presbyterian Seminary as part of a service run by myself and several other students who had served as YAVs in the past. Each of us shared a short reflection in lieu of a single, longer sermon.
In any ministry, there will be times when you feel you need to be in more than one place at the same time. When that ministry is foreign mission the feeling can be much worse as those places may be thousands of miles apart.
While I was serving in Northern Ireland, I found myself on the planning committee for Street Reach, a major, annual event that takes place the Thursday-Saturday after Easter, when most of the youth are on holiday from school. It’s a fantastic event that takes place in several cities around the country (I was only working on the one in Lisburn, not the national). Street Reach is rooted in community service and outreach performed by youth. Partly to get young people doing good things in their communities, partly to show older people that young people do in fact care about their communities, and are not, as is often believed, all hoods good for nothing but trouble.
We had spent several months preparing and all that was left was to celebrate holy week, take a final few days to rest and prepare, and then lead our respective groups during the event itself.
Then, on Good Friday, I get a series of frantic emails, ims and skype calls. One of my college friends, due to graduate in a few weeks had been found unconscious and not breathing that morning on a couch in our fraternity house. He’d been out the night before, people had been checking on him periodically, at 9 AM he appeared fine, but by 11, nothing. He spent the next three days comatose, and died Easter Sunday. I wish I could say that I was a mess, that I had some breakdown trying to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus while mourning the death of Joe, but it really didn’t process. At least not that day.
Over the next few days, I keep talking to several of our friends, mostly his roommates the year before who graduated with me and one other mutual friend who would have graduate with Joe.
They all wanted to know when I’d be back, to tell me that his funeral was Saturday, a group had chartered a bus to get to his hometown in Southwest Virginia and back to Charlottesville, and that if I got on a plane I could be there with them. They thought they needed me with them, but I knew I couldn’t go. I needed to be there. No one I was with had any idea who Joe was, but I also knew that there was no way I could afford a plane ticket, and I had to see this event through. So while they were all coming together to talk, to cope, and yes, to try to avoid assigning blame, I was doing a last check to make sure we had put together everything we needed. While they were at his funeral, I was trying to sleep so I’d stay conscious through a second day of washing windows, picking weeds in people’s gardens, and painting over sectarian markings on curb stones. Except I wasn’t sleeping, and while my hands and clothes were dirty from doing all those things, I was hovering somewhere over the Atlantic. Still trying to grasp the fact that Joe wouldn’t be there when I got back. And Saturday, during the block party celebrating all the good these young people had done in their neighborhoods, I finally had to slip away, find a staircase to sit on, and face that Joe will forever be frozen at 21, but Lisburn and Northern Ireland were not, and I had to work to change what I could, and accept what I could not.