A Thanksgiving Prayer

As Thanksgiving grows near each year, the women of my family have a tradition of taking an annual trip together before the madness of December descends upon us.  This trip is for celebrating and strengthening our relationships as grandmother, mother, daughter,sister, aunt, cousin, and niece.  Because I have four sons and a husband in my immediate family, this time with my female relatives is especially necessary and important for me.  I am eternally grateful for each of these women and our time apart which always serves to renew and refresh my spirit. 

However, today I find the idea of leaving home is bittersweet. I am as excited as ever to go and be with my family but I am sad to be apart from my new friends at World Relief, even for a week.  It was with a heavy heart that I told my Burmese friends I would not be there on Tuesday to tutor English.  We had eleven most wonderful students on Friday for English class and it makes me so sad to have to miss this Friday. How it is that these people have become so near and dear to me in only a few months of interning at World Relief?

This morning for devotion I read a poem of thanksgiving by Howard Thurman, for "all the warmth of humankind that I have known." This poem helped me to understand the love I feel for my new friends and my sadness at being apart from them for the next few weeks.  It actually put my deeply felt appreciation to and for them in the context of family. And so this morning, hours before my family arrives and we begin our journey together, I offer this prayer of thanksgiving:

"We bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that we have known:
Our mothers' arms,
The strength of our fathers,
The playmates of our childhood...
The tears we have shed, the tears we have seen;
The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the eye with its reminder that life
is good.
For all these we make an act of Thanksgiving this day."

Caren is a student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School currently interning with World Relief Nashville for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Empowered to Serve

After two months of interning at World Relief Nashville, I am learning what it means to empower the local Church to serve the most vulnerable. Last Tuesday as I drove to tutor my refugee friend, I couldn’t help but think about how much more confident I am now than I was six weeks ago. In the beginning, I didn’t know anything about how to teach English to a newly-arrived Burmese family. I didn’t have any experience working and building relationships with people so incredibly different from me in nationality, culture, customs and language. I hadn’t ever taught a job readiness class, or picked up a newly arrived family at the airport, or shopped at K and S World Market.

During these two months, I have had some stressful moments, to be sure. But whenever I find myself in over my head, I reach out to a World Relief staff member who patiently and gracefully pulls me back to safety. Someone is always available to hear my concerns, answer my questions, direct me to resources, offer suggestions and simply tell me, “Well done.”  Time and time again, I have been encouraged and affirmed in my ministry here.  I have been empowered by the confidence the staff has in my being able to do this work and do it well.

This is something of what I have come to recognize as Empowering the local Church to serve the most vulnerable, knowledge, compassion, support, resources, patience and grace. But the most important way that World Relief empowers is by its confidence that the Spirit of the Living God is present and active in history and has called the Church to participate in God’s reconciling and redemptive mission in the world by caring for and serving the most vulnerable.

Paul says, "It is the parts of the body which we consider least dignified, that we surround with the greatest dignity" (1 Corinthians 12:23). The most honored parts of the body are not the head or the hands, which lead and control.  The most important parts are the least respectable parts.  World Relief truly believes in the mystery of the church, that the people of God can actually embody the living Christ in the world.  When we surround the strangers among us, the most vulnerable, the alien, the orphan and the widow with great dignity, respect and love, then we place Christ at the true center of our worship.  This confidence is the spirit of being empowered to serve the most vulnerable. 

Caren is a student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School currently interning with World Relief Nashville for the 2011-2012 academic year.