Melissa McLamb
Mission Year + Melissa = ?
verbalized — What’s the reason for Melissa’s involvement with missionyear?
Answer – Love.
I want to be challenged to love fully and love well. To love God, and to love the people that He has created, is really all that matters. I know I can’t do that on my own, and I need others to help me along the way. We all need community, eh? I’ve met people who have joined in with MissionYear in their ministry and I’ve seen and heard of the good fruit that has come from God’s work in their time serving in the city. I believe that the only thing that has the power to save is the love of God and I am so excited about living and serving with others who acknowledge the power of God’s love and are willing to share what they have freely been given.
Jesus took time to sit with, listen to, share meals with, celebrate with and walk with people all out of His great love for them. As followers of Christ, we are to imitate and be like Him. Wherever we are, whoever we find ourselves with — our duty is to love, to love as we have been loved. MissionYear recognizes the simple Way of Christ and challenges people to live love everyday. And that is something that I want to be a part of.
Being a participant of MissionYear’s program is not something that I have written down on some sort of imaginary check off to-do list before I die so that I will have lived a full life. I don’t believe that I have to do MissionYear. But as I have decided to join in on the bandwagon with these love-‘gurus’, I trust that Jesus will hold to his promise to be with me and teach me along the way.
just as life, this next year won’t be an easy journey…but can i expect anything less than growing pains?
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…
Melissa McLamb's Blog
just to say... / May 28, 09:25 AM
i leave later this week to go to Massachusetts.
A ‘soul-mate’ friend, Rachel is with child and getting married!
i’m so happy to be able to get to be there for the celebration and to just see her.
It’s strange- the tension of being away from close friends and family for a ‘longer than i’m used to’ amount of time.
Even having just visited home back in January – it was such a short visit and not humanly possible to spend unplanned hours and days with everyone i wanted to. There’s a sense of disconnection that comes with being in another place. I mean, the whole not being able to be in two places at once and held down by the space and time continuum thing —of course, there’s that. But like, my social life – friends and family that i don’t talk to and see now (or not as often)…that’s really different. I talk to other people now…people that are near here within our community and the relationships that i had pre-MissionYear mean no less to me, I care just as deeply about these people in my life—but it’s just different. not good, not bad — just is. I miss being near many of them. And sometimes when I talk to my mom on the phone, it’s like “Wow. I haven’t talked to you in nearly 3 weeks!..and there’s so much about my life here—-and yours there, that we don’t know about because we aren’t living with each other or at least seeing one another every other day”
it’s wild.
i’m still not used to it.
but. i will say that i’m glad to have the continual support of so many people that i don’t talk to consistently.
it’s awesome – not having to do anything special for someone and them just genuinely caring about you and your well-being. that’s a gift like no other. i’m so glad that people can be so generous and great.
and it’s good to remember that i don’t have to be everything to everyone.
and neither do you.
enjoy the friends who are close to you.
be true (and good) to yourself and to everyone else.
in whatever small ways that can look like for us in our small realms where we are found.
and then —-that’s no small thing.
“I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things.” -Rumi
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a long walk. / May 28, 09:25 AM
Yesterday Ashley and I went on a walk.
A really long walk.
6.5 miles.
Almost every nationally recognized holiday in the summer, the church we attend (Greater Galilee Missionary Baptist) puts together a walk.
So we met downtown at Jackson and State…and then we walked and walked and walked all the way past Austin, near Oak Park.
For you who don’t know the geography of Chicago — this is around 6.5 miles.
It was interesting to walk and see the difference in the makeup of the neighborhoods. Downtown, I saw big tall business buildings – like the Sears Tower – and endless restaurants and entertainment places and we passed Whitney Young High School which was just tagged as one of the best schools in the nation. Just blocks away from Whitney Young we passed Crane High School which is where earlier this year a student was shot and killed because this other guy wanted his ‘buck 50’ hat. Maybe that could happen at Whitney Young. I don’t know about the difference in security and services within the school house —- but I know that from the outside it was a drastic difference—-from green and clean to abandoned buildings and trashy sidewalks.
we kept walking.
for a long time.
it was cool to do that with people from the church. And a couple of women shared with me about the different neighborhoods as we walked through them and about their experience living in Chicago.
when we got to the end- we were all tired and ready to eat.
i have a blister on my left toe -the big one.
if the police have bigger and better guns will it stop the violence? / May 22, 01:11 PM
here’s an article about the minimal fitness tests that officers are asked to undergo in qualifying for the recommended semiautomatic rifles that are to supposedly keep peace on our streets:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/953842,CST-NWS-guns16good.article
(why name the test : P.O.W.E.R?)
there will always be bigger and ‘better’ guns to get.
if the cops get these…and people still want to shoot and protect their own, they are just gonna go out and get bigger weapons themselves.
Will this mentality of having to always outdo the enemy in machinery in order to ‘control’ them, help us? it’s such a power struggle, right? i mean, can we just give that up? No- we don’t want people out on the streets shooting anybody and anything recklessly and carelessly. But shooting to prevent the shootings?
i dare think that this is not our answer to stopping this violence.
the M4s have the capability of carrying bullets within a mile radius compared to the quarter of a mile traveling bullets that the pistols set off now.
it’s horrifying, the decisions being made in the name of our ‘security’.
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the need for exposure. / May 22, 12:54 PM
There are children in the neighborhood who have never been outside of N. Lawndale and some who do not know about Lake Michigan and how close it is. Chicago is such a great city! There’s so much to do that’s fun and free and open to the public (and that kids love too!) but it’s like those opportunities are still from ‘another world’ for some families living just outside the city.
We all had a day off of school and so some of the kids from the apartment building, Aswan (*remember the first newsletter? This is the funny, friendly boy who asked Sam and me to tutor him/ who also just recently moved but we have kept up with one another. I made him an awesome mix c.d and he called to tell me he loves it) and I went to the Field Museum downtown. A simple trip right? Just me and 4 kids, a few hours at the museum and then back home mid-afternoon…Yeah, right. I realized that day how different and easier it would be to have a car at times, getting to places with other people. I had to make sure all the kids had fare cards with enough money on them to get to and from downtown and if not, that we could make up for it with change, and what about transfers? Will we get food, will that be an extra stop? What time will we get there, how long will we be at the museum? And with travel time back, what time do you guess it will be? As a house, we have set aside money as ‘ministry fund’ and it can go towards things like transportation to do good things with our neighbors. We had a great time together. This was back in February.
We walked through this evolution exhibit at the museum. And I found Yakira staring at and standing in front of an early hominid. (it was inside a glass box). So I said something to Yakira about the idea that we have evolved from these creatures and I asked her what she though of that.
Y: I would kill myself.
M: But what if everyone else you knew looked similar and people as we know them only looked like ‘this’ and you weren’t really aware of how you looked…like there are no mirrors or clothes?
Y: I don’t care. I wouldn’t want to live.
She wouldn’t even think twice about it.
LOOK! It’s Keante, Yakira and Telia playing in the snow while we wait f.o.r.e.v.e.r for the bus to come. THe kids are so funny. it’s all about immediate sense experience with them – either we are having the time of our lives or we are bored out of our minds. so we had to make fun as we waited for the bus. they were literally questioning why they had come at all after we had waited over 5min for the bus. it was cold and we were tired.
April Newsletter. / May 22, 12:53 PM
Hello! May is almost here and I couldn’t be happier about warmer weather! Serious. But like Rev. Spiller says, “if you don’t like Chicago weather – hang around, it’ll change in 10 minutes”. Just to say, the forecast is calling for snow tomorrow. Funny. The flowers that we helped plant in the empty lot outside the apartment building are growing and it’s cool to see the kids get excited about new blossoms. And we have plants in the house too to remind us of new life in spring.
Compared to now, this place was barren in the winter. It’s like everyone was hiding inside and then with the warmer weather, they all came out at the same time – a myriad of people. And with more people being out, there has been more reported violence. Just over last weekend in Chicago, 9 people were killed in 30 shootings. One weekend alone! The numbers seem so unreal. And it’s even more unreal to think about the loss and hurt of individual lives from this violence. The numbers are just thrown at us in the papers and they are so abstract and common in the media that it makes for an easy distancing from. I was reminded the other day by an admirable educator and activist, Jonathan Kozol, that when we look at injustice instead of seeing abstractions, we should see real people. And when we see real people, they demand a response from us. The majority of the shootings are tagged as gang-related. And I just read an article that talked about the breakdown of discipline among gangs members – it argued that it used to be that older gang members would look after the younger ones but now they are all being locked up and there isn’t any sense of commitment to the group anymore, so it’s like a local minister says “kids are just out with guns
running their own game”.
With the increase of violence on the streets, there’s been more community organizing within our neighborhood in promoting peace and stopping the violence. Ashley has helped organize the ‘Fast Friday, Pray and March’ initiative – a collective effort to stand up for peace on the streets. Groups are coming together among churches, concerned citizens and youth to participate in marches to stop the violence. There were around 200 people this first Saturday who came together to march. That’s powerful, people agreeing on the necessity of peace, working together to demonstrate their demands for non-violence and a
safe place for themselves, their children and families.
Among external realities of violence, I’m amazed at the resiliency of so many people and their continuous hope for a better day. I find strength in the shared vulnerability of all of us but mostly I am dumbfounded by the courage that I see in the lives of my neighbors. When I hear tragic stories like when students at school entrust me with their real life experiences of abuse, death, and hardship – It makes me so sad and it’s like sometimes, I feel immobilized by it. And here they are the ones that have experienced it and just talking to me casually about it and not showing much emotion. I’m like, “what’s wrong with me? –why do I feel this?” I’ve always been a sensitive person, but since the end of January it’s been harder to bear even the hearing of tragedy and the hurt is more real to me. Sometimes I wish I could just put some sort of protective shield up that would keep me from feeling the emotion. But that hasn’t been given to me.
It’s strange the different ways that people respond to change. I was talking with Janice, an artisan at WomanCraft and survivor of homelessness, and I asked her how she remains happy, she said about the prevalent ‘bad stuff going on’: “I have to block it out. I just don’t think about all the frustrations…because they really stress me out…I just let go of things that are out of my control and go on.” And then just this past week at school, Carter (a highschool junior), was sharing with me about how he had watched a woman be raped in his backyard. I was horrified – he was sharing with me as we were plastering a peace sculpture for art class. He asked me if I would leave Chicago or what I would do if that had happened to me. I was silent for a while, shocked that he asked me to see myself in that position and then honestly I told him that I don’t know what I would do. I asked him the same thing he asked me and he said almost instantaneously, “I’d forget about it”. Why? “Because…bad thoughts can bring you death and it probably wouldn’t ever happen again anyway.” I have to think about that because it’s inconceivable to me at first…to just forget about such tragic experiences and realities, to choose to block it out for your own good. It’s almost like some of our neighbors here, in order to survive – don’t take time to mourn or it just looks completely different that what I expect it should. The hurt and death is more widely accepted as ‘that’s just the way it is’. When hearing about the fatal shooting of a fellow student on campus, Breanna, a sweet-hearted freshman girl, said to me “Melissa, you can’t be sad. If you are, you’re going to be sad all the time then, because this is a sad place”. But it has to be okay to be sad – to express that yes, maybe this is the way that things are but it doesn’t mean that this is the way that things ought to be. We all need a safe place to mourn our losses and what hurts us.
I’ve been told by a few people recently that the ability to feel this hurt profoundly is a great gift. I don’t know. But I do know that I can’t change many things for my neighbors. I can’t change their past experience nor their external circumstances, just as I can’t change mine. But I can change what I choose to see in the midst of the hurt. I can choose to see endless potential within students who have been told through experience that it’s too late for them to make something better for their lives. I can see innate greatness and goodness in people who don’t believe in themselves. I can treat people as if they already are what they ought to be and in that I can help them to become who they are capable of being. Maybe I can be a spark of hope for them that a better way is possible just by being present with them, practicing patience, showing respect and caring about who they really are. One of the most empowering things for me in my own life has been receiving grace and patience from others—growing the confidence that I am worth it. This is what I want to share with others.
So last month’s newsletter, thanks for reading it – I got more calls, letters and e-mails in response to that one than to any previous. It was a liberating write for me, as I want all my writings to be. Thanks for caring and taking the time to let me know you do. It means a lot.
All your kind support is great. Without it, this transformative experience wouldn’t be possible for me. Right now I’m currently at $6,786.34 with a goal of $12,000. MissionYear is a rewarding and life-changing opportunity for so many people. And you are making it happen by giving to us. Your sharing enables us to share in the lives of the people within our communities, learn from them and develop understanding (and skills) that we need in helping to make a better world for all of us.
