Megan Jackson
Mission Year and Me
My name is Megan, I’m 20, I live in Bellingham, Washington, and I’m a graduate of Western Washington University hanging out and staying involved in a campus ministry. I have a chocolate lab “puppy,” two brothers, two parents, three roommates, and I live in the most beautiful place on earth. (At least, as far as I can tell.)
In three months, my life will be pretty different. My name will still be Megan, but I will be 21, living in Philadelphia, and doing Mission Year. The rest is a bit of a mystery. Life next year is a fluid and confusing concept, consisting mostly of question marks and a few excited, emphatic exclamation points.
What made me decide to leave the west coast (the only place I have ever lived) and move across the country to live in an inner-city neighborhood? To devote my life to loving God and people… completely unpaid? Many factors fed into this decision, but the biggest one was a combination of two books – the Bible, and Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. I grew up reading the Bible, but it was when I read Shane’s book on the floor of a hotel lobby as an impressionable 18-year-old that the Bible started to shake me up a little bit. I had considered what the bible says about God’s love for me (For God so loved ME that he gave up his son, right?) but God started to open my eyes up to the reality of his love for the world, for everyone around me, and especially for “the least of these.”
God turned my life upside down that year, and has been continuing that work ever since. He has been teaching me to die to myself, little by little, so that his kingdom work can be accomplished through me and in me. And, in a lot of ways, I’ve served him and crept out of my comfort zone into roles I wouldn’t have expected of myself.
But now I need to die a lot more. I can feel the call to GO, to be out of myself, to live with the people God loves and love them righteously with His holy and perfect love. I don’t want to just serve the poor, I want to live with them. And I don’t want to simply go to church, I want to be part of the body of Christ that transforms lives and communities outside of a building called a church. I don’t want to just read my bible, I want to swallow it and live it out loudly. And I want to learn to see the face of God in the faces of people I meet – the poor, the hurting, the oppressed, the hopeless – and the people I am not going to meet here, in my suburb of Seattle, my college bubble, or my Christian community on campus.
Sorry if that was a little longer than you were looking for. I have to admit, I was an English major, and I miss those 20-page essays.
About Mission Year
Mission Year is a year long urban ministry program focused on Christian service and discipleship. We take teams of young people, place them in an area of need, and help them to serve people and create community. We are committed to the command of Jesus to “love God and love people,” by placing the needs of our neighbors first and developing committed disciples of Christ with a heart for the poor. Learn more about our first year program…
Megan Jackson's Blog
The End / Jul 17, 05:42 PM
The end of Mission Year is coming. It’s like a death, but the kind that you see coming from a long way off. I don’t know if there’s any real way to actually prepare yourself for the separation that you know is inevitably coming.
Oh, I’ve been through all the stages. I’ve been in total denial. (“What? Mission Year is going to last forever, what are you talking about?”) I’ve been angry. (“What the hell am I supposed to do with my life?”) I’ve bargained. (“Just let me stay in Philly for another six months? A year? Until I figure out what this all means?”) I’ve been through slight depression. (Crying, telling my journal, “I’m just not ready for this to be done!”)
And now… acceptance, which I guess is the closest I’m going to get to being okay. It’s not exactly an ecstatic I-love-my-life! kind of acceptance. It’s more of a quiet, peaceful, walking-with-my-head-high-toward-the-door kind of acceptance. I will hate to leave this place, I really will, but I’m ready. I’m ready to go home. I’m ready to rest. I’m ready to watch television (alright, so I’m shallow), I’m ready to hang out with my family, I’m ready to hike, to drive, to revel in the trees, the mountains, and the ocean. I’m ready to hug my friends.
I’m ready to start living my life outside the confines of a program. While Mission Year has given me so much, and I definitely want to incorporate many of the things I’ve learned in Mission Year, I need to begin to live my life intentionally when nobody is telling me to. I’m ready to try – probably to fail sometimes, but to keep trying.
As I write this it is July 14th and I am heading into my last weekend. One more week of camp, and then Atlanta for closing retreat, and then we pack up and go home.
Goodbye, Philadelphia. And thank you.
Hello, June. / Jun 15, 05:05 PM
So, I realized last week that Mission Year is almost over. We were having our weekly points meeting, and Ra was giving us all the important dates we needed to know, which happens almost every week. I was entering those dates into my phone, and we went through June… through July… and got to July 31st. And then it hit me. I typed “Leave the Betty Forever” into my phone for noon on the 31st, and then I basically went into panic mode.
I ran across a journal entry the next day that I had written back in October… oh, the irony. I had written, “Mission Year will never be over. This year will never come to an end. It will just keep being cold, and I will keep trudging through the gray to work every day. I’ll be here forever.” Then, in February, when it seemed like I was going to be trudging through fifteen feet of snow every day for the rest of my life, I wrote again, “The year will never end! It will always be winter here.” Spring felt years away, and I couldn’t even fathom summer.
Enter that recent Saturday. Now suddenly it’s June, and as I write this I’m about to run my very last day of the after-school program. I’m starting to go through my stuff (how did I accumulate so much here?) to figure out what I can actually fit in a suitcase to take home. It’s all we’re talking about at City wides – what are your plans for next year? what do you want to do? are you getting a job? going to school? staying in Philly? moving back in with your parents? holing up in the basement of your Mission Year basement in denial? or setting off fireworks as the plane/car/train/bike/boat moves towards freedom and your hometown?
Yep. The world is coming to an end. At least, the world of Mission Year, and that’s a big deal. For the last nine months I’ve been immersing myself in this life – the structure, the rules, the patterns of living, the relationships, the community. It’s all I’ve had. Every other structure I was comfortable with got taken away, and this year I’ve learned to adapt to something new.
Now that I’ve made the decision to move back to my hometown of Auburn (at least through Christmas) I’m realizing that I don’t know who I’ll be when this program is over. I’ve changed so much in the last year… will I continue to embrace everything I’ve come to value? Will I continue to live simply, appreciating the spiritual in the everyday and rejecting society’s over-consumption? Will I continue to build intentional relationships with the people I come across? Will I backslide, or will I actually continue to move further in this journey of finding Jesus in the patterns of my life?
I wish I knew. I’ve come far enough to realize that I know very little about myself, and that my own actions often surprise me. There’s no way to prepare for what next year will be like. I have no idea what will happen in terms of job, church, community, etc. I keep trying to resolve this blog… but I don’t think there’s a resolution. This is my constant internal dialogue right now, and it’s not going to be resolved.
I’m trying to be really present here in Philly still, but it’s hard. Sometimes when my team is sitting around our living room laughing I realize how much I love them… and then how much I’m going to miss them when this is gone. I will see them again, but it will never be the same. I have the same thought when I’m hugging my favorite fourth grader, when I buy cheap coffee at the local store, when I do the dishes in our kitchen, when I wake up at 6:30 to do devotions… actually, scratch that, that’s one of the things I won’t miss. I am so good at going new places, but I am so bad at leaving the old ones!
So there’s this tension – be present, process next year. Always back and forth. Always very, very bittersweet.
Welcome to my June. Month ten. Here we go.
Spring / Apr 2, 12:36 PM
When I was in high school I came up with this seasons theory about myself. I decided that my general mood and process as a human being followed the patterns of the seasons of the year.
Summer, I decided, was the hyper (and, well, lazy) season, full of fun and lying around doing nothing. In Summer I would be energetic and colorful and open to new possibilities. I would wear skirts and flip-flops and go to the supermarket without doing my hair or putting in contacts because I simply didn’t care.
I love fall. In fall, I would be excited and bookish and thrilled about the transition of seasons. I would be interested in learning everything, interested in people, feel incredibly intelligent, start writing again. That was fall.
In the winter, I would die a little. Winters have always been marked by self-deaths in my life, deaths of ideas or relationships or optimism or excitement. Winter is a sort of hibernation inside myself. I get quieter and less willing to be a people person.
But spring…. was like waking up after a long, long nap. As the trees grew back into leafyness and the weather got warmer, I would sort of click back into myself again. Every spring was like a rebirth of myself and my life.
I don’t think I’m the only one who goes through this sort of seasonal transformation, because I’ve been reading the other Mission Year blogs, and there seems to be a general waking-up across the board.
Winter in Mission Year is really difficult. The weather sucks (if you’ve been following weather on the East Coast, you know that Philly got DUMPED ON in February), the people stay inside, the days feel long, the community begins to experience more conflict and moves into a less feel-good stage and more into real, flawed community made of real, flawed people. For me, winter was a lot of coming to terms with my own ugly brokenness, my flaws, all the things in me that are mucky and disgusting and that I desperately need saving from.
But I can feel spring in the air…. as I write this I can see the first blossoms of the season on trees and I am wearing a bright skirt. I may not be as peppy as I used to be (seriously, have I gotten boring?) but I am beginning to embrace the beauty of the world, the beauty of God, and the beauty of me. Things that I have struggled and struggled and struggled with are coming into more clarity, and acceptance is becoming a theme in my thinking.
Nothing is settled in my life, and that can be kind of (read: really) stressful, but while winter is a season of waiting and being still, spring seems to be a season of seeing things creep into being. What do I want to do? I don’t know, but there’s a peace in feeling things stirring and becoming.
So, here’s to green and growing things. Here’s to spring, here’s to peace in newness.
Springtime Jesus
You, Springtime Jesus,
just as I’d settled down for winter,
you broke into my heart
and danced your love right across it
in a mad excess of giving.
Just as I’d got comfortable
with bare branches and unfeeling,
just as my world was neatly black and white,
there you were,
kicking up flowers
all over the place.
Springtime Jesus,
I tried to find a way to tell you
that there were places
where you could or could not dance.
I wanted to guide you on my paths
and have you sign the visitors’ book;
but you laughed right through my words
and sang to me your melting song,
causing sap to fire the branches,
causing the flames of buds
to flicker into green bonfires,
causing a windquake of blossom,
causing burstings, searings, breakings,
causing growth‑pain,
causing life.
Springtime Jesus,
the fullness of life can be frightening
and I’m lacking in courage.
It isn’t easy to live with a heart
that’s wide open to invasion.
Teach me, Jesus, how to move with you,
step for step, in your love dance.
Touch my fears with your melting song.
Gift me with your laughter,
and, in the mystery of your Springtime,
show me the truth of the blossoming Cross
—Joy Cowley
Good Teachers / Mar 17, 05:51 PM
I have never been around kids so much in my entire life. This year four of my teammates and I have been running an after-school program for the school we work with, LOGAN Hope. We work with kids in first grade through eighth grade, we do a lot of homework help, I play a lot of foosball, we eagerly look forward to 5:30 and peace. Monday through Thursday pretty much goes like that.
At the beginning of the year, I was exhausted. We didn’t know any of the students and we were a little blindsided by their differing responses to us, by the completely unfamiliar protocol of the school, by the stress of working with an unknown group of children. I came home every day and collapsed on the couch. Once a girl said something to me that nearly made me cry with frustration. The beginning…. the beginning of the year sucked. I was a little upset that I had been thrust into this childcare situation without being asked first if I even LIKED working with children.
As we got to know the kids we work with, something shifted. They stopped comparing us to last year’s Mission Year team. (Or at least stopped complaining to my face.) They got funnier, or I started to get their humor. The kids I had mentally deemed trouble, hopeless…. I started to see sparks of gentleness or helpfulness or hurt or downright beauty. Then I saw more than sparks. It is easy to love the second grader who throws her arms around your waist every time she sees you. It is harder to love the often belligerent fifth grader who doesn’t listen to you. But I began to love them all.
Yesterday was a beautiful day. It was the warmest day of Spring so far, bright, sunshiney, and things were blooming. I let myself relax a little on the strictest rules and just enjoy the company of the kids I was working with. These are a few things I learned yesterday:
Thoughts on Neighbors, Friends, and Bridges. / Feb 14, 11:56 AM
I wrote this while brainstorming for a newsletter, but it was a bit too long-winded for that. And while I would gladly write newsletters that were three, four, five, or sixty-five pages long, I figured I would condense my material and blog it instead. I’m a terrible blogger anyway, and I need to do it more… especially now that I know people actually read this stuff. Here’s what I wrote:
Neighbors became our friends in the first few months of Mission Year; I have realized that they are now my family, the people I rely on and the people for whom I would do much. These relationships are totally mysterious to me, because while they are basically the entire point of Mission Year (I should have seen them coming) they don’t appear to make sense. Many of my friendships here in Philadelphia and in Logan are with women who are in a different age bracket than me. We have had radically different life experiences and are currently worried about very different things. (Me: I can’t figure out how to make a decent pot of rice. Her: the care of a grandchild. And the list of different concerns goes on.) While I have mostly only known the daily life of suburbia, the majority of my new friends have lived their whole lives in urban Philadelphia. We may both be Christians, but have worshipped in very different churches.
And yet – here is the mystery – these relationships exist, and actually have flourished. It was so much simpler for me to build friendships with people who were so like me in experience and age, in race, in religion, in musical taste, in education, in socioeconomic status. But my experience this year has changed my definition of friendship. While I previously looked for commonalities that could provide bridges from me to a person without much effort on my part (You love said obscure Indie band? I love them! Let’s be friends) I have been pushed to become a bridge builder, someone who reaches across the awkward gap (and it often is awkward) to communicate Namaste to my neighbor, to say the God who dwells in me recognizes the God who dwells in you, and I choose to love you despite myself. It is incredible to realize that the differences that once looked like insurmountable obstacles to a friendship are actually just creases in the fabric into which we both are woven. I learn about what it is to be a human and a child of God from these relationships, and that is a beautiful and necessary thing.
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