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
Why I Suck at the Internet Now (A Technology Fast Reflection) / Oct 8, 10:09 PM
I apologize that I suck at blogging. I was so optimistic… but I didn’t realize how not having a computer with internet around the house 24/7 would make frequent blogging difficult. I especially didn’t count on a technology fast making getting on the internet all the time tedious and exhausting. Now that facebook doesn’t consume something like fifty-three percent of my waking time (that’s exaggerating, but still, it was ridiculous), I have gotten out of the habit of being constantly connected to the world and every friend I have ever had.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the internet and I LOVE my friends. I love that all of their faces are a few clicks away. I like that I can be reminded of their birthdays and see how they are. I like finding out when people are in relationships… or out of them.
I like having access to different news sources around the world. I like being able to run and pull a recipe off the internet for a spontaneous dinner or craving. I like google. I REALLY like google. And I like listening to music online.
But now, I’m out of the habit or something. When I get the chance to go on the internet after my shift at the library, I end up leaving before my twenty minutes are up. I go online and feel the immense freedom and power of cyberspace. I check my e-mail and delete the Travelocity e-mails that keep clogging up my inbox. I sit for a minute and think. I go to Mission Year’s website and look at the blogs. I sit for a minute and think. Then, because I simply cannot think of anything else to do, I log off.
Even on Sabbath, when the world of facebook is available to me, I get excited, change my status, read the news feed, respond to whatever people have said to me… then sit and think for a minute… then log off. The whole process takes about ten minutes. I am horrible. I’m sorry if you think that I’ve abandoned our friendship just because I don’t facebook you anymore. I just don’t really facebook anymore.
And I’m trying to figure out if this is just a surface thing. On one level, it could be because I just don’t have the access to it anymore. That’s not a sign of any great virtue of mine. But on the other hand, I feel less need to live my life online. I feel less obsessed with maintaining every friendship I’ve ever had, from diapers (you know who you are) to my month in Oregon. At least… I don’t have to maintain a constant contact with them. Just because I talk to friends once every few months doesn’t mean that they aren any less significant to me.
Because my teammates and I don’t have our phones or our facebooks to escape to (except on Fridays), we have learned to be really present with each other. I am learning to be very present in my neighborhood, when I’m walking to and from work, when I’m working with the LOGAN Hope kids. Other than unique experiences like mission trips and summer camps, I can’t remember a time in my teen/adult life when I was more actively living my life in the present.
What will this mean for my life when I can start going on facebook multiple times a week? What will this mean for my life when I get out of Mission Year and into “the real world”?
Tomorrow is sabbath… and facebook… and honestly, I’ll probably spend most of the day drinking coffee and journaling and reading anyway.
Libraries, Logan, and Realizations / Sep 18, 08:36 PM
It’s my Sabbath (day off) and as I write this I’m in a bookstore in Center City, drinking coffee and drinking in the atmosphere I’ve missed so much – the intellectual, yuppie, fast-paced, bookish, collegiate feel. Students are studying at various tables around me and an international student is sharing my table and studying a map. (We’ve tried to figure out how she can get to where she needs to go, and it’s difficult. I know so little about Philly as of yet.) But I’m trying to remember that this isn’t some sort of reprieve from my life in Logan. I don’t stop being a resident of North Philly just because I’m downtown and away from the run-down neighborhood I live in the other six days of the week.
Over the last week my roommates started hearing rumors that our library in Logan would close in a week or two because Philadelphia is dealing with a budget crisis. A visit to the library confirmed this – and informed us that not only would the Logan library close, but every library in Philadelphia. The librarians (who really are wonderful people) were optimistic, but we were indignant and slightly outraged. We scoured the internet for blogs and more information about what we could do – I think we were prepared to jump on a protest bandwagon and brandish angry signs on the steps of some capitol building.
(http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/17/news/economy/Philadelphia_budget_crisis/index.htm?section=money_news_economy)
And especially me. Libraries are my heart, my idealism personified, and my potential vocation. The Logan library was going to be the site of my community service in the mornings. All this rhetoric was gaining momentum in my brain – cutting arguments about Philadelphia being the birthplace of the free library (and of the free world), about Benjamin Franklin squirming in his grave, and about the future of the urban life in America being doomed into an intellectual darkness.
I think I was a bit naïve and ridiculous.
I have lived in Philadelphia for a grand total of three weeks. (And less if you take into account the five days I spent in the Atlanta area for training.) I think it was fine for me to be upset about the libraries closing. Closing libraries is a HUGE deal, particularly in urban areas like mine, where the education is sub-par and many residents rely on free internet access at libraries for information, job searching, and educational opportunities. But what I didn’t realize, as my blood was coming to a boil, was that the city had been caught in this struggle for much longer than I had been in the city. Philadelphia had already threatened to close some libraries last winter, and didn’t follow through with its threat. It’s a power struggle between city and state, and cuts to public services in the city were being used as a tool of persuasion for the state to allow an additional sales tax in the city. (That’s the impression I’ve gathered, anyway.)
As of yesterday, the state legislation was passed and the libraries get to stay open, we get to keep getting our trash picked up every week (thank goodness), and over 3,000 city employees get to keep their jobs.
(http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2009/09/14/daily35.html)
My original intent for this blog was to write a brilliant response to the budget cuts and show myself to be a politically aware and savy twenty-something who is deeply passionate about public issues. But when I got on the internet today and checked various news services, I realized that I am woefully ignorant. And I realized that my motives were somewhat less than humble.
Somewhere along the way I formulated this picture in my head of what I would be this year. I would be revolutionary. I would be living out my ideals. I would be standing up for human rights. I would be defying poverty and injustice. I would be awesome.
And that’s just not the reality of my life or of Mission Year.
Last night at Citywide, our director, Caz, had us write on a piece of paper an expectation we had for Mission Year that isn’t realistic or true. I wrote:
“Me: full of grace, a shining example of Christ’s love, wise, humble, a role model, strong.”
Then I lit this expectation on fire and tossed it unceremoniously into a pot. Next, Caz had us write down a new hope and expectation for the year to replace the false one. I wrote:
“Me: broken, full of mistakes, lots of weaknesses – but covered in Christ’s blood, his grace evident in my brokenness.”
I know this is a little meandering, and I apologize. I don’t know if I’ve made my point or not, but I’ll give you a thesis statement just in case:
Everything I thought I knew about myself, about urban life, about injustice, about poverty, about the gospel – it’s all being stretched and pulled in ways I didn’t see coming. Truths are strengthened and given real foundations – and my own additions to Christianity are being painfully stripped away. What do I know about what really goes on here? Next to nothing. I am no savior for Logan. They don’t benefit from my white skin, my education, my affinity for recycling/organic food/free-trade coffee, or my idealistic notions about how to fix the world. They need Jesus. They need a real savior who saves and loves perfectly. I’m praying to be a broken vessel, so that as much of Christ comes through as possible – and I’m hoping that I’m not a hindrance to the gospel.
Hopefully my next blog will be more coherent. There’s so much to process and work through – I could write for days and days. (Don’t worry, though, I won’t make you read it.)
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15 Hours / Sep 1, 02:27 PM
Dear Father,
You know what you’re doing, right? You understand whom you are sending? You know all about how silly I can be – about my weaknesses and doubts – about my inconsistency – about my failures?
I can’t get on the plane tomorrow if you don’t come with me. If your hand isn’t on me the whole flight, I may as well just have the pilot turn around. If it isn’t your fault that I’m leaving tomorrow to move out into the terrifynig unknown, I refuse to go.
But if it’s your plan, your will, your masterful weaving of lives and experiences and hearts and events, then that’s that. I’m gone. I can believe in you if you’re believing in me.
I believe; please help my unbelief.
25 Days / Aug 4, 12:37 PM
Every time I try to sit down to write, I find that I have too much to say, and not in a helpful way. Thoughts and ideas are jumping around inside my head like superballs, colliding into each other and gaining speed. Writing is like trying to force some of those ideas through a funnel onto paper, and maybe you haven’t tried, but it’s difficult to get superballs into a funnel.
This one is bright and sparkly. It’s the thought of Philly next year, of living with my team and getting to know the reflection of God’s image in his creation as I live out this mission. It’s inevitably pink (it just is) because we’re all girls – at first a disappointment, and now a predicted joy and a blessing. What was a vague future plan is becoming reality more with each e-mail and calendar page. Less than one month – insane. I am excited… and terrified.
One ball is an indiscriminate color and murky. It’s the knowledge that a part of my life, the part that I have loved deeply, is over. My time in Bellingham, forever my true hometown, is done. I can’t go back to Western or The Wombat (the name of my apartment – naming houses is a Bellingham thing) or my family at CCF. My best friends and a chunk of my heart live there, but I’m relegated to visitor now. This part of my life experience has expired, and I have to get over missing it like crazy.
One is a deep blue, I think. My brothers will grow and change this year and I won’t get to watch them. Devin will graduate high school and Connor will transition into pre-adolescence. I’ll probably come back to a gangly middle-schooler and a grown man. I’m not prepared for either.
The green ball is my least favorite, because it represents money. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to convince myself that money is the least of God’s problems, that he’s more than big enough to cover finances. The truth is that some support has come in, but that it’s floundering, and I’m panicking. Money has such a tight grip on my life. It’s always a concern, and I think this is more about security and comfort than anything. But there it is. Money, the ugly green monster.
This summer I will peg as orange – unpredictable, sunsety, moody, impulsive orange. I never would have predicted I’d end up in rural Idaho with my grandparents, and I certainly had no idea I’d leave halfway through the summer to go to Oregon to take care of a baby. The best laid plans of mice and men… But this is the kind of summer that leaves a mark, I think. It’s a mark I definitely don’t understand. I’m alone a lot of the time, with opportunity to think and imagine. I can’t figure out what I’m learning exactly, except that it’s happening somewhere under the surface. I can feel my heart growing and being shaped, and I can’t see it, but I know it’s real. Does that make sense? Sometimes God grows my brain, but sometimes he bypasses it altogether. That’s probably smart of him… it’s a very faulty brain, full of misgivings and doubts.
One of these balls is shrinking, and I’m glad. It’s the part of me that is dying more and more every day, surfacey, selfish pieces that are being chipped and chiseled away.
I still can’t manage to reign my thoughts in. They’re still bouncing. I think today I’ll go into town and sit down for coffee. I’ll let those balls bounce away and I’ll pray for peace and understanding. If I get the peace without the understanding…. well, I’ll keep trusting and watching and praying and bouncing.
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Summer, or Why Copernicus Was Right / Jul 9, 11:03 AM
I’m not going to Mission Year directly from school, like I think a lot of the other participants are. For the last year I’ve been working, paying bills, buying groceries, and living “in the real world.” I had been working the same job since August and I had a lease until September. As I was thinking about my summer plans, who I wanted to visit and how to get the most out of my time, God surprised me. I started to feel more and more strongly that he was calling me to quit my job and live with my grandparents in rural Idaho for the summer.
I’ll spare you my inner agony, worried about moving from a fairly large city (my comfortable place) to the middle of farmland. But I felt called to rest, to a sabbatical of sorts where I could focus on my relationship with God and charge myself up for Mission Year in the fall.
That’s where I am now. It has been those things, to an extent. But more than anything else, it’s been a wake-up call, and not a very pretty one. I realized a couple days that this “vacation” is demonstrating exactly how self-focused I really am.
The thing is, I am living with two wonderful grandparents who are doing their best to spoil me. They are buying all my favorite foods, coming up with activities to keep me from getting bored, and trying to accomodate me in every possible way. I’m not allowed to pay for anything. I have to wrestle the sponge away my grandma in order for her to let me clean the kitchen after dinner. They even drive my car into town so that they can fill it up with gas.
And yet… I find myself constantly dissatasfied. I am not in complete control of my time, and every time something disrupts my plans (things like reading an entire book in one sitting or sleeping in until ten) I start grumbling inwardly. My brothers visited, and I was thrilled to have them here… until one of them finished off “my” cereal, and then I had to hold back malicious words. I was frustrated with my poor attitude about everything, but I wanted everyone and everything to cater to my spoken and unspoken wishes.
For all I’ve grown in the last few years, for all the things I’ve learned to lay at Jesus’ feet, for all the maturing I know he’s worked in me, I still have not yet learned that I am not the most important thing. I still have not realized that I am to put other people before myself. How simple – and how seemingly impossible. I felt back at age 7, demanding everyone’s focus on myself.
We’re a self-driven culture. We’re individualistic. People who really serve others are rare and rarely noticed or thanked. Every time my grandma introduces me to someone over here she tells them about my plans to do Mission Year. I get wide-eyed gapes, wonder (“You’re so brave, sweetheart!”), and respect. Everyone seems to view this as a selfless thing, and it is. It’s a fantastic thing to give up a year to try loving someone more than myself. But I simply can’t do it. I’m selfish. My world is about me. How will Mission Year fit in?
My summer’s plans have changed. In a week I’m leaving Idaho to drive to Oregon for a month to take care of my baby cousin in the mornings while her mom works. This offer came in the midst of realizing how self-focused I really am. Although I know he called me to Idaho, to rest and a lovely rural area, I know I’ve learned what I need to. First the realization – now the practice. I’m praying that baby Jolena will be a beautiful way to force me to daily die to the temptation to put myself first.
I don’t want to get to Philadelphia and suddenly realize I don’t know how to put other people’s needs above my own. I want the self to die so that Christ can live in me instead, because I can’t love anyone apart from his power. I have a week left with my grandparents. I’m praying for a lot of selflessness for this week. I haven’t been an ideal granddaughter, but I want to treat them with a love that lives outside what they do for me and has everything to do with how Jesus would love them through me.
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