Giving Blood and Giving Up

If I am given responsibility for a project, it becomes mine.  I have a definite idea of how I want things to go.  There is a picture in my mind of how everything will play out, and when someone tries to erase parts of that picture and scribble in their own drawings, I get mad.  This is not a piece of my personality I am proud of.  I turn into an uptight, controlling, snappy monster whose motto is, “Do it my way or I will use very sharp words to stab at your soft, fleshy underbelly of a limbic system.” 

When it comes to working in a professional environment, this is not an acceptable way to operate.  But it’s hard not to.  The temptation to latch on to the hot fire of anger and go for a thrillingly out-of-control ride is almost too much to keep me rational.  Oddly enough, people do not respond positively to this kind of fiery aggression.  Where I want things to run smoothly, they become rough and jagged.  Other people get angry, and I just feel like a terrible creature, born from hate and darkness.  Lose-lose. 

And so, I have had to learn to let go.  The embarrassingly simple revelation came to me as I lay flat on my back, blood draining from my body: it’s not about me and what I want.  The thing that is actually important is the success of the Blood Drive for which I have taken responsibility.  It is not mine.  I am only the facilitator, and I must give of myself instead of clutching what I want to my chest.  The work I do is about something larger and far more important than my personal satisfaction.  If I can remember that, some good just might be done in spite of me.

Julia Hawkins

Lesson in Humility

First of all, the start of the year has been wonderful. The new staff had 2 great weeks of training where we bonded, became experts on service-learning, and pulled off StreetFest smoothly as a team after Emily Wolffis spent the summer preparing. It was a blast.

We wrote a new covenant. Some of you may remember last year's two word phrases. This year is quite a bit different, as is typical with a tide of new people. We have picked 5 main words that we will focus on this year. They are love, justice, hope, humility, and patience. Along with each word, we have written several questions that we will seek to "answer." These questions will never be fully answered, but maybe someone else can expound on the covenant itself in another post.

I realize that the title "a lesson in humility" is difficult to gulp down in and of itself. It's not really an attractive heading and some people may have even stopped reading right then and there. Who really wants to learn how to be humble? That is certainly not our natural mode in life. We prefer pride and self absorption, don't we? It is a harsh reality. I would rather think about my day and the set of problems placed on my plate, rather than spend time trying to understand someone else's worries. And helping them? Boy, that's a stretch. I am a college student, a nursing student, in fact. I will help people the rest of my life, why must I set aside time now to invest in understanding and helping others? Right now my sole purpose in life is to grow and learn as much as I can.

Here's the thing, I grow through my experiences and interactions with other people and the attitude I take while doing that changes how much I will truly learn. If you really set back and think about how much you are learning from other people, versus how much you are putting into other people, it's often disproportionate. Disproportionate because they teach you so much more than you could ever hope to give back. This is true for many relationships in life. Professor to student is certainly like that. I would hope that some of your friendships are like that. What about parent to son or daughter?* Realizing this truth is helpful in intentionally taking on a humble mode of existence. It is helpful in being open to other worldviews (yeah, I was going to try and avoid Calvin language, but I can't help it.) It is helpful in finding a sense of peace about your own imperfections. It is helpful in so many ways, I'm sure you can think of more.

This is the Service-Learning Center mantra. Reciprocity. Learning to serve and serving to learn. It's become so engrained in the way I think, I am hoping I've said enough here to fully explain. If anything, I hope that this is just a starting point for peer conversations. Also, feel free to add feedback or correct me in the comments. :)
Thank you for reading.

*There are plenty of cases where this is not true, after all, we are broken people. I have not meant to be hurtful and I apologize if this is off mark for anyone. Perhaps your relationship with parents is not ideal. I hope that you have then found a mentoring relationship that serves a similar purpose.

-Melanie Roorda, ABSL Coordinator

Dwelling in the Grey

We were talking at our staff meeting last night about part of Dan Butin's "Service-Learning in Theory and Practice," particularly about what it means to dwell in the grey. In the chapter we read, Butin is writing about various ways to theorize service-learning, one of them being an approach he calls "antifoundationalism." This obnoxiously-long phrase means something just as vague as the word itself: it's about challenging our biases and assumptions, avoiding an end goal which is too-easily achieved, and forcing us to remain open to different ideas and continue hard discussions. In short, antifoundationalism is about seeing the world in shades of grey.

Which is hard, eh? (I don't know why my Canadian side is coming out so much right now... hmm, maybe it's an unconscious attempt to challenge your assumptions! Just for clarification since I will continue to refer to the US as "our country," etc., in this post: I'm American, but my mom is not. And sorry to any non-American readers--it's a convenient shorthand, though an ironic assumption for this post...) Anyway. We were sitting at our meeting wondering how well our office does at the job of encouraging dialogue on the 'greyness' of life and service, which is an important question to ask, when I realized how inadequate I am to help lead that discussion. I struggle with allowing grey in my own life.

Personally, I am far too prone to trying to figure things out in my head, reducing them to black and white so that I can form an opinion about them and proclaim it boldly. It's tiring to dwell in the grey! It can be exhausting to never settle, to continuously probe for the other side of the story, to sweat long and hard in the dirty dig for truth. So, sometimes I long for easy answers that simply work, no matter what. But I don't think they exist. We're often guilty of thinking they do, but the reality is that things in life are never--yes, I think that's an appropriately-strong word--black and white.

This interim I took a class on war. I had been to Vietnam and Cambodia last interim to study the Vietnam War (or, in their words, the American War... interesting switch of perspective, eh?). I also was able to spend time in Bosnia this summer studying the war there and reconciliation efforts in the wake of the violence. My worldview was literally exploded this year, expanding so fast that I'm still not even sure what's happened--sometimes, all I know is that the world is much bigger and more complicated than I once thought. It hit home again over interim: war--in fact, all of life!--is not black and white. My war class frustrated me because of its over-simplicity, because of the way we often focused exclusively on the American military, neglecting to engage really deeply with 'other' (non-mainstream-American) traditions, voices, points of view, beliefs about what is just and right. Maybe we would still end up in disagreement. But the 'other' still deserves legitimacy. To assume that the story of our own country's interests is the only proper metanarrative to use in explaining war--and the rightness and wrongness of what happens there--is a scary, scary problem.

I think there's a connection here to the work of the Service-Learning Center. Part of our work is to take Calvin students, a majority of whom still come from the same socioeconomic, racial, and educational background, and expose them to the 'other.' It doesn't stop there, of course--from that exposure we hopefully move to relationship, challenge, questions, acceptance; hopefully we move from focusing on our own ability to serve to humbly being served ourselves, and from giving charity to learning how to really love. It can be a transformative process, a really beautiful and challenging thing. But a large part of that process is the difficult and terrifying piece in which we let go of our assumptions. In studying war, that means acknowledging that the 'other' was fighting for a cause he or she believed in just as legitimately as your own country's soldier, and that the lives of 'other' soldiers and their families are just as valuable as the lives of your own people. It's a difficult (and often unpopular) thing. It challenges the way we act, if we really believe it. In service-learning, a similar thing happens, but in our context, it means asking difficult and terrifying questions that challenge our assumptions about our own motives, privilege, efficacy, pride, and wisdom--asking whether or not, at the end of the day, we actually have offered anything to to our neighbors after all. That's not always popular either, but it's the greyness we must dwell in if we're going to be engaging our community as authentically as we ought.

It's not simple. There are too many people with heart-wrenching stories and valid perspectives for life to ever be simple. War is not simple, once we start to hear the stories of refugees and Iraqi soldiers and Afghani store owners and American Marines. Loving and serving and learning with our community is not simple either, once we start to hear the stories of partner agencies, homeless alcoholics who have been abandoned by their churches, pastors who sacrifice every evening to work with refugees, parole officers, store owners involved in urban renewal, and refugees from wars... no, none of it is easy. The truth is not black and white. It's complicated and grey, and this is the reality of the world we live in. Thank God we're in a place where we can embrace it. Let's keep doing so.

Posted by Kelly

Another Exercise in Walking Humbly

This semester I have the opportunity to do a Comenius Internship at United Church Outreach Ministry (UCOM), the organization mentioned in Tu’s post about 2010 Transitions StreetFest. This is an exciting position for me personally as it increases my experience in the non-profit world, but it is also an interesting experience as a Service-Learning Center employee because the Service-Learning Center sends many students to UCOM as Homework House tutors. My short experience at UCOM so far has reminded me of the importance of acting with grace and humility towards these service-learners and towards other service-learners that we send from our office.

When we send students to UCOM I expect them to do good work. I think that they should be on time, be polite and do an excellent job tutoring the elementary students with whom they work. I want them to reflect when they return and make a long-term commitment to the program.

These goals are easy for me to make as I sit in the Service-Learning Center, a place I am very comfortable in after three years of working there. However, my perspective has changed slightly after beginning my own “service-learning” experience at UCOM. At UCOM I have to ask, even about the smallest detail—“How do you use the printer?”, “What’s the name of that volunteer again?”, “How many pounds of cheese go into the bag?” It’s frustrating sometimes not knowing what to do and feeling as though I’m not doing a very good job or being helpful to the agency. I’m tired after a day of communicating in Spanish and I don’t particularly want to reflect on my experience. And, I probably can’t make a long-term commitment to UCOM because I most likely will be leaving Grand Rapids after this semester.

How, then, do I reconcile my experiences feeling not-so helpful and not-so reflective with my goals for the service-learners sent from our office? Well, to begin with, it’s important to remember that service-learning is a process for everyone involved. Service-learners won’t be terribly helpful at the beginning of their time and may not be very reflective. Hopefully, though, after spending time at their agencies students will learn the ins and outs of the agency and start to be an asset instead of a burden. Hopefully, too, as students have more experiences they will begin to reflect naturally on how what they see and the lives they live are connected.

Also, it is important for us at the Service-Learning Center to treat the service-learners with grace and humility. We don’t know their life experiences or even their experiences at their sites, so we must be careful not to judge their involvement without a little more investigation. Our expectations for them shouldn’t necessarily lower, but our way of interacting with them must be careful.

In fact, the whole process of service-learning is a game of grace and humility. The agencies we work with must treat the Service-Learning Center staff with grace as we try to be responsible to them and to be full-time students. The students must have grace and humility with us and with the agencies as we work out organizational kinks, and we must have grace and humility with the students and with the organizations as we try to communicate and work together.

Once again, the StreetFest theme of this Fall “Walk Humbly” comes back to challenge and encourage us to walk humbly with our service-learners and agencies.

Transition 10: Being Reminded of How to Walk Humbly

On Saturday, January 30th, we as staffs of the Service-Learning Center were blessed to be able to spend our days serving and learning with the new and transferred students of Transition 2010. Though this day was in many ways a much smaller scale of Streetfest Day, we were glad to see the same excitement and willingness from the students to learn and serve as those came in the fall.

The students were given a more detailed presentation of the city of Grand Rapids and its unique neighborhoods. They also had a van tour around Grand Rapids before their arrivals at the agency and thus were able to see these neighborhoods outside the classroom introduction. The students were then split off to go serve at two different agencies, YWCA (Young Women's Christian Association) and UCOM(United Church Outreach Ministry). I stayed in the group of students working at UCOM and enjoyed much of the interactions and the reflective conversations we had. It was the first time for me at UCOM and thus like all the new students, I was very appreciative of the history through which UCOM has developed as an outreach ministry, a tutoring center (Homework House) and a food pantry (partnering with ACCESS) for the southwest community of Grand Rapids.

Not only did we learn about the food system UCOM tries to maintain for their clients, but also we got to be the servers by repackaging the donated food, cleaning the freezer and rearranging the grocery shelves for future clients. Though some projects were done outside in the freezing weather, I was glad that most students were eager to help out with them. The conversation afterwards was refreshing and encouraging. All of them had fun engaging with one another as they served. They also expressed appreciation for the good works being done at UCOM and their eagerness to go out and explore the city of Grand Rapids.

As we wrapped up the day, we as the staffs were glad to have met these new students and been part of their orientation to Calvin. In a way, this Transition day was a refresher and encourager for us to continue our humble walk of service to Calvin students and the greater Grand Rapids community as the whole staff and as individuals.

Streetfest '09: Serving and Learning About Grand Rapids in an Attitude of Humility

From Thursday, September 3rd to Saturday, September 5th, over a thousand new students participated in Streetfest 09, serving the community of Grand Rapids. Some of them have lived in this city their whole lives, some have not even got their heads around the Calvin College circle, let alone the greater community. However, we, (the staff in the Service-Learning Center) have received immensely positive feedback and reflections from the new students, the student leaders and the participating agencies regarding their service and learning process during StreetFest.

Amazed by the things we heard, we are reminded of what it means to be humble in our service to the community. These various jobs that these students accomplished may only have a short-term effect to the different communities, but they surely showed the students the needs of the different communities within Grand Rapids, and what they can do in small ways to address these needs. One thing that surprised me was that even the students on the biking tour of the city, who didn’t provide any hands-on service with the agencies, came to appreciate the city in many ways (my colleague and I ourselves learned a lot about what has happened to Grand Rapids downtown recently driving along and getting lost at times). Though more than half of the new students on the bike tour were from the Grand Rapids area, they all learned a lot about the city by riding through many parts of the city that they had never been to and speaking with people that they normally would not have spoken with. There was one guy that approached us as we stopped near the Calvin Art studio at 106 S. Division. At first, most of us thought he was going to ask for money, but he actually just wanted to talk to us and to wish us well as we continued the tour. As Professor De Graaf , the bike tour leader, expressed in the reflection afterwards, we do not know how such a high point of our day can come from the least expected situations. Such experience also reminds us as students to be humble toward the people whom we serve, and encourages us to get involved with the greater Grand Rapids community.

As we say good-bye to StreetFest and begin our new academic school year, the challenge of “walking humbly” remains. Our hope is that the students will take away that humble attitude as they serve and explore the city of Grand Rapids.

One great thing that is happening this Friday September 18th from 8:00am to 5:00pm is Park(ing) Day. The Service-Learning Center is joining the Off-Campus Programs office in reserving two parking spots downtown to raise awareness about transportation options in the city and to encourage students to continue to get involved with the city.
Check out the links below to learn more about Park(ing) Day and don’t forget to visit us this Friday. http://www.grand-rapids.mi.us/index.pl?page_id=10304

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhvp_d4HZrE

Finally, the Theme for StreetFest 2009: Walk Humbly

Although in the same sentence as do justice and love mercy (Micah 6:8), “walk humbly” is not met with the same enthusiasm. God doesn’t gives us the option of walking humbly, he commands us to. The hope for StreetFest is that this idea of walking humbly will be explored and that students, faculty, and staff will commit to a new way of seeing and participating in this world.

Walking conveys quite a different message than running. Running means stress, speed, and desire to get from point A to point B as fast as possible without slowing to observe what’s in between. Walking, though, is much the opposite. Walking still gets you from here to there but it allows for, even encourages, fellowship, conversations, intimacy with the surroundings, and the ability to see a place in its true form.

Walking can be powerful- it was the pace from which Christ administered his love on the least of these in society. If we are to emulate Christ we must also walk- walk in order to notice the details of God’s creation, walk to create opportunities for meaningful conversations, but most importantly walk to be in stride with those who are struggling.

Humility can be applied many ways as well. First, as we walk through life we must be humble before Christ. Our savior left heaven to die for this spoiled world. He lived his life here- never commuting from heaven. He not only healed and preached but spent time and socialized in a non-serving way. He lived with prostitutes, prisoners, non-Christians, and by doing so showed that they were just as deserving of his attention and saving as anyone else. We must respect that this was Christ’s focus, and be humbled by the knowledge that we weren’t necessarily the type of people that were on the top of God’s list to see.

We also must be humble before others. Too often we elevate, spiritually, people with a well-rounded Christian education, people who have clear criminal records, those who attend fancy churches, and people who are gifted with the ability to thoughtfully articulate themselves. As we (should) know, none of these things make a person closer to God. Instead we should be humbled that every single person was made in God’s image. We should be humbled that the people we “serve” are just as connected to God as we are.

An attitude of humbleness is necessary in working towards the Service-Learning Center’s goals of long-term relationships, racial reconciliation, and cultural intelligence. “Walk Humbly” is simple and familiar, but rarely is it importance dissected as frequently as other commands.

In other StreetFest news, we have again commissioned the work of a local Grand Rapids artist. This year, Rick Beerhorst, a Calvin grad, is helping us translate our thoughts into a meaningful logo. The Beerhorst family consists of Rick, his wife, and their 6 children who all make up “Studio Beerhorst”, the family business. They are committed to the city of Grand Rapids and have mastered the art of car-less living by intentionally buying a house within walking distance of the Famer’s Market, grocery stores, and places of worship. All of these lifestyle choices make Rick a perfect artist to represent what StreetFest attempts to communicate to incoming students. I will update more as details emerge!


Thoughts?

Cultivating Humilty

In a world that asks us to take sides and make choices, it is easy to reduce everything to us and them, me and you. We position ourselves on one side of a line that we drew in the sand long ago but then forgot that we ever did, and we look outwards, always looking at the "them," that which we don't believe to be ourselves. It is the unfortunate reality, though, that our ability to understand the world in terms of "us and them" or "me and you" is more often the inability to looker deeper within ourselves, and see us in them, myself in you. When we do this, the line in the sand is dissolved with the shuffling of feet walking back and forth, people talking with one another and shaking hands.

When we believe things so strongly, things that seem so good, it is hard to take the tempered perspective, to look within and see the world outside more clearly. Instead, the passion of deep conviction more often spurs us towards a rhetoric that posits sides in opposition to one another. This present election season is an obvious example of this. However, even outside the spotlights and soundbytes, there is this tendency still. Within the service-learning community there can be a tendency to see the action of volunteering as inferior to that of service-learning, and the proponents of each perspective and practice stand on opposite lines arguing with one another. But if we take a moment, we stop and realize that human beings are never so well ordered as to do anything so consistently. Service-learners are never just service-learners, but rather there are times when what they are doing is much more akin to volunteering, and vice versa. Concepts and practices of volunteering and service learning do not lie on opposite sides, but rather collide and wrestle with one another in a single person. I recognize that I, myself, am one of these people, never perfectly consistent in all that I do and say.

Of Community

Human beings are chaotic and complicated. There is very little about the human being that can be reduced to a neat and easy model of explanation. Trying to seek out the motivation for any given action or thought often leads us on a trail backwards in our histories as we trace the elaborate series of events and people that have brought us to this present moment.
As human beings we find ourselves always afflicted and gifted with this thing called a past that has been formed through the communities and relationships we are always involved in. Have you ever noticed that human beings are perpetually in relationship to one another? The use of language especially testifies to this fundamental characteristic of life. There cannot be language in isolation from relationship between things capable of communication. Language can only take place in a world where there is at least a “you” and an “I.” Our near constant use of language then reminds us of our community-based existence. Sometimes we remain lifelong members of our communities, such as our families, and other times we migrate from one community to the next, such as the student bodies we belong to as we progress in our education, but always we are embedded in a web of relationships that form us and sustain us. Our identities, how we live, act, and think all bear the unmistakable fingerprints of this life in community, which we understand through what we call our past.
In each present moment, the past haunts us and helps us in each decision we make. That is, as human beings, we always seem to bring a particular perspective to any person or event. We are creatures conditioned by the communities and relationships we have been and are a part of, and they leave us with habits of thought and action.
In application, this means that when we participate in service-learning we are always coming to any given person, group of people, neighborhood, city, or situation with certain ideas and attitudes towards or about them. While we can and often do need to change the content of these ideas and attitudes that we carry with us, the general characteristic of being creatures perpetually in community, means that we are always going to be affected and guided by our past in how we act in the present and future. Our best recourse is to first understand exactly what it is we are coming with in our interactions with people and places. How do I perceive this person or neighborhood? Why do I perceive them in this manner? What experiences have I had with volunteering or acts of service that now govern the way that I engage in these acts of service? How do the religion, family, and neighborhood I have been raised in affect how I relate to this place or person(s)? How does the relationship I am now in with this person(s) and place leave me with new habits of thought and actions for the future? We are human beings, constantly involved in relational existence in this world, forever experiencing the present become the past, and the past affect the future.
Sometimes our histories within our communities leave us with wicked prejudices and opinions, and destructive behaviors towards the people and places around us. But sometimes our histories within our communities leave us with habits of compassion and nurturing, thoughtfulness and love towards the people and places around us. To answer the questions concerning how the past affects what we do, say, and think in the present does not always need to lead to being harshly critical of oneself, although it will likely involve that sometimes, rather the meaning resides in the larger task of realizing our humanness. We are limited human beings, forever with a past, present, and future, never stopping, always living and interacting in community.

1. What communities have you belonged to, or belong to now?
2. How do certain communities affect your habits of thought and action?
3. Can we, should we, escape the habits of thought and action we form in the communities we are members of?
4. For many of us, one community that we commonly belong to is the body of Christian believers throughout time, called the church. How do the traditions of the church equip us in our interactions with the people and places we will come in contact with through our experiences with service-learning? Are these traditions positive or negative?
5. How does your understanding of the degree to which you are deeply affected and guided by the communities which you have been a part of, in turn change the way you see others? Does this attitude cultivate a greater degree of graciousness, charity, and patience towards others when you realize that we are all deeply limited human beings?

Finally, the question of Now What? With the beginnings of an understanding of the habits of thought and action that our histories in communities and relationships have left us with, what do we do next?