During my sermon “Faith Deserts” on July 31, we explored how Jesus had just learned of the murder of his cousin, John the Baptist, and had stolen away to seclusion only to have the crowds follow him (Mt. 14:13-21). Rather than send them away, Jesus embraced them, taught them, and ultimately fed them in what we often call “The Feeding of the 5,000.”

I put it to the congregation that sometimes we find ourselves in “faith deserts,” these places where we lose faith in how God and people around us can be a part of going through the big stuff, the little stuff, and all the stuff in-between. Trying to tackle everything on our own, all the time, isn’t getting us anywhere. It’s giving in to the fear of letting others in. Instead, my hope is that, as Rally Sunday approaches, we’re giving serious thought to how we can use the fall as a season of fresh starts and rejuvenation. My hope is we can find the small groups and emotional support networks we need, be they here at Exelsior UMC and/or elsewhere, and that God will be a welcomed, present part of this new way of exploring life. I asked people to think about this for six weeks.

So have you been doing this? Have you been taking this six-week period between July 31 and Rally Sunday – September 11 – to see if you’re in a faith desert or a faith oasis? If so, what’s your answer and what are you going to do about it? If not, isn’t it time you asked yourself about it? Isn’t it time you asked yourself if you’re letting God and the people around you in so you’re not trying to do it all by yourself? I think so.

I’d love to hear what you have to say on the matter. Continue the conversation on our church blog, faithjourneylifejourney.com.

Regards,

Nate Melcher

I am writing this on one of my favorite days of the year. Tonight we will hold the confirmation final retreat for this year’s 10^th Graders. It is 18 hours of intense listening to each other that we hope will make for lifelong friendships and strong Christian faith, too. What I particularly like is the honest sharing of lives and the total appreciation of the gifts that each youth brings to life. This is the acceptance and encouragement we see Jesus bring to his relationships in the Bible. And this is the mission we have taken on as a congregation; connecting faith journeys to life’s journey. We become community together.

Our mission trip this summer to Pocahontas, Iowa was particularly rewarding because of this Faith Journey aspect, too. Because we showed up to help just a few months after the tornado, people were still telling their stories. They were still finding personal healing in the fact that we took time to listen to them, look at their pictures and do some volunteer work in the hot sun. An Iowa farmer and some suburban kids turned from strangers to community members as we responded to the blows a tornado struck on a farm.

I think this is the reason for all of us to attend these first few weeks of Welcoming Sundays or Rally Sundays. It is the time to find a fellowship group or study group or service group that can give us the opportunity to listen to each other and make real community. As much as anything we do in the church, connecting our lives moves us from strangers to community. In doing that we experience how a Faith Journey makes for a happier and more meaning-filled Life Journey.

On the journey,
Kent

Someone’s Life in the Ditch

We pulled beams, boards, sheetrock, branches, roots, rocks, twisted pieces of metal, cookie tins, furniture pieces, shoes, clothes, underpants, toys, and a lot more out of those places. It’s a testament to one of the great truths of a tornado: when it enters your life, it truly does spill it all out for everyone to see. We were pulling items out of the ditch three months after the tornado; imagine how much was already removed before we got there. Now think about all of the stuff in your house, all of it, splayed out for the neighbors to not only see but for them to pick up for you. A tornado makes your life an open book and that’s out of your control. I get the sense that the loss of control is one of the most difficult things to struggle with in the midst of such tragedy.

John’s Show

Next, we headed over to John’s farm just down the road. We’d been told ahead of time that John intended to “put on a show for us,” tell us his story. It’s exactly what he did.

The night of the storm, John was in his home, his wife in Arizona visiting their grown children. He saw there was a storm coming but didn’t think about heading to the basement until his neighbor, Jim, called him and said he’d better head down.

Good thing, too. The storm took away nearly everything. Machine shed was gone. Grain bins were gone. Implement equipment mangled into useless pieces. John called his children from his spot underneath a heavy, slatted pool table. That’s where he took shelter when the first tornado hit. He looked up at the rain and watched it clear until he could see the stars and feel the calm quiet. It was quiet enough his children on the other end of the line could clearly hear the bricks falling one by one. Then the line went dead. That’s when he knew something was really wrong – the second tornado was on its way.

What didn’t get wrecked by the first one did by the second. All that was left was the remnants of the house, now uninhabitable, and two old corn cribs, the sort of older grain storage buildings that don’t get used by farmers anymore – the sort you’d wish had been blown away instead of the rest of the buildings and grain bins. But that, like so much in the midst of a tornado, is not something one has any control over.

“It was just like you see on TV,” John added. “Just like it.”

John couldn’t get out of his house on his own. The house shifted, torn from its foundation, leaving John with a view of the stars but no way to leave. The bricks of the basement caved in all around him. Neighbors came after a half hour or so spent in isolation, praying, and dug him out of the basement. When he finally emerged, John saw much of his property torn up and saw a lot of his neighbor Jim’s farm strewn throughout his own fields.

Down the road, his brother, Gerald, lost everything. As for John’s wife, she went online while she was in Arizona and found a house in town to buy. John took a look at it, cashed the insurance check, and bought it. When John’s wife came back into town, she went right to the new house and helped get it ready. Finally, she came back out to the farm and cried for an hour. She saw their whole life and the arm her husband was born in completely wiped out.

John added two more pieces to the story before we cleared out his fields. He said the reporter from the Pocahontas Democrat who said his shoes had been sucked off by the tornado was a fabrication. True, he’d emerged from the basement without shoes on and without a coat (his brother, Ben, worked at the Town & Home and opened it up so people could buy midnight provisions). He wasn’t wearing shoes because he didn’t have time to put any on. The other thing John said really sticks with me:

“I spent a year in Vietnam,” John said. “This was scarier. Over there, you were with friends. Here, I was alone.”

The Roof! The Roof! The Roof Is All Finished!

A small crew including Loretta, Molly, Jacob, and Jake headed back to Verina to help Chris, Geri’s son Luke and one of his friends, and others finish up the shingling job on City Hall. The job was completed faster than the team expected and it felt good to get the surprise of actually not having to leave the job half-finished before we left.

Several Verina residents drove by, too, honking their horns and waving in recognition of the group’s hard work. Some residents even stepped out to personally say ‘thank you.’ It was a rewarding time, fully understanding how people have been watching us work and appreciate what we are doing.

Hospitals and R&R

I took a quick trip into town to drop Dan off at the hospital after getting a small foot puncture from a nail while cleaning up Jim’s ditches. At around that time, Brenda bid us farewell and headed back to Minnesota to help prepare for Vacation Bible School at Excelsior UMC (which we’ve since come to learn is, unfortunately, having to be postponed due to anticipated outdoor heat levels this week). Meanwhile, the crew finished at John’s and I brought Dan back in time to head back to Jim’s and do another sweep of both the ditches and fields.

Lunch was at the coveted Pizza Ranch restaurant, a beloved pit stop of many LYFE Camp counselors. The field crew went after showers while the roofing crew went before, swapping the shower key as one group entered and one group left. Also leaving was Jake and Justin, brothers, who had to head back to Minnesota a little early.

The afternoon was going to be filled with activities and a trip to the pool. Instead… the group was dog tired, once again. After some napping, some laughter playing electronic Family Feud, some friendly competition with Catchphrase, a group of folks swung over to the Dollar General for snacks and shopping. One youth rented Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 7.1 and the group watched it (I wanted to but a nap culled me away; I have yet to see it, so no spoilers in your comments!).

Dinner was another epic-sized meal provided by members of HUMC. The menu consisted of lasagna, garlic bread, salad, and more dessert bars than anyone could ever handle in a lifetime. We spent some time relaxing after dinner and had our processing meeting / worship before the evening was through. We talked about trying to be “little Christs” in the world and take our ability to do good care for others back home with us in our everyday lives. Hopefully, we can live up to that challenge as much as possible (though parents, perhaps go easy on the chore list for the youth for at least 24 hours; let them catch up on some sleep!).

More Hip Hop Than You’d Think…

The evening ended for Steve, Dave, Dan, and Kent with around 700 pieces placed in a 1000-piece puzzle. The evening ended for Loretta, me, and a majority of the youth at the Teen Dance at the County Fairgrounds Expo Center, now clear of all of its exhibits and vendors. Everyone danced the night away (well, an hour of it, anyway) before we headed home, tired out and ready for our final day of work.

Tomorrow, we rise up for a 7:00am start and once again, working a few fields for farmers. As always, your comments are appreciated and read to the group as “letters from home” and we’ll probably have time to read them before we head out at around 1:00pm on Monday.

Regards,

Nate

1. Turn off your air conditioner.
2. Turn on some bright lamps and point ‘em right at you.
3. Start a fire in the fireplace.
4. Sit next to it.
5. Rub some dirt and tar on your arms, face, and in your hair.
6. Bend over and lift up your computer fifty times or so.

Doing all that could be key to feeling the heat of the day out in Verina, Iowa. I’ll cut to the chase and say that after our work day ended, I discovered a post on my Facebook page from Art saying the state of Iowa had declared a heat advisory and asked people to get indoors near the time we’d wrapped up for the day. Sunday looks to be even hotter, so we’ll see what happens in terms of what sort of work we do and at what time.

Paint the Town Red, White, and Blue

As you can likely tell by now, today saw us return to Verina to continue work on yesterday’s unfinished projects. If we had thought a little more, we’d of taken more “before” photos of the park because the “after” is a night and day difference in terms of a welcoming arena for gathering, playing, and town pride. The crew finished painting the bell (red for the bell, white and blue for the base) as well as the small barn (a more accurate nomenclature, I’ve been told by the youth, than when I named it a “shed” in yesterday’s post), the merry-go-round got its white panels to match the red panels and blue bars, and the picnic shelter got a fresh coat of white paint on its peaks and beamwork.

The merry-go-round received a little extra white paint in the center, which had already been painted blue. A little splatter turned into *ahem* a clearly intentional white splatter piece of artwork. Despite its accidental origins, it does look nice, indeed. The merry-go-round isn’t the only thing that received accidental painting. Stepping off of it, Kelsey managed to stick her foot onto the edge of a paint can and tipped a wave of white paint on her white shoe, leaving one side white with mud and dirt and the other side pristine white. Meanwhile, William reports the crew had to contend with not only hornet nests in the picnic shelter rafters but also “spider nests,” – large clumps of spider webs with hard clumps of wrapped egg sacs and “food.”

Later, several people got to stand up on the lift – while others like Trevor, Mitchell, Sam, Alex O., and Alex N. used ladders to gain access to the picnic shelter roof – and trim tree branches. Katie, Olivia, and Anna cleared the debris that fell to the ground.

Hijinks Ensue

Much of the debris was put into piles which Justin promptly turned into a fort. He stood his ground in the fort, a big smile on his face, as his peers piled more and more sticks and branches on the battlements. It was around this time a new member joined our work crew: Max Liquidator. That’s the name of the water gun Brenda brought out of her van to give willing (and some not-so-willing) participants a quick and cool splash of refreshing water. Tragically for Justin, it was Max Liquidator who assaulted the fort.

Hattie, Maggie, and Dana got to go up on a mechanical lift (“As high as it would go,” I was told) to paint the peaks of the barn. That’s when Dana received mystery paint on her leg: her scheming friends on the ground below gave her a quick swipe with the brush and backed away, leaving its origins a “mystery.”

Unbeknownst to William, Dave gave the girls some sponges to scrub their paint brushes clean. So when William insisted he could clean his brushes as well, he started by hand. After a half hour or so, Dave gave him a sponge and the work was done in a snap.

Up On the Rooftop

Meanwhile, the shingle work continued on City Hall. During the morning, all of the shingles got stripped away and piled into the waiting wagon below and the tar paper and plywood boards got put up on a majority of the roof. I had run to town to enter yesterday’s blog post in so when I came back for lunch I saw the roof crew sitting there, beat. Each of them was coated in a fine layer of what looked like black soot. Arm hair patches were turned into thick clouds of black hovering a half-inch above their arms. Streaks of oily, sweaty dirt crossed their foreheads and cheeks. Once white shirts were a patchwork of shades of gray. And the posture they took at the tables was that of outright exhaustion.

In the afternoon, just over half of the crew went back to the church to shower up and head to the pool while the rest of us continued to work on the roof. I was on the ground crew with Sam, Dave, Maggie, and Molly picking up nails, shingles, and delivering up sheets of plywood that Kent and Steve cut at Mayor Chris’s house. Meanwhile, Hattie and Dana joined Jacob, Jake, Loretta, and a few locals on the roof to lay the new shingles and attach the plywood and fresh boards. By the time we finished for the day, nearly a third of the roof was completely shingled.

It was hot, long work and at a certain point, it was simply time to call it quits. For some it was difficult, leaving a job unfinished when so much time and energy had been poured into it. Yet there’s something of a teachable moment in that, too, in terms of learning how things unfinished affects one emotionally. It came up during our processing meeting that evening in small groups, as well as topics like self care, humorous anecdotes, and discussing how we can apply our work to our lives and faith, metaphorically.

And the Rest of It

No one went to the pool; we were too beat. It’s likely on the docket for Sunday, though, after we spend time in farmers’ fields and ditches of debris. Because it’s due to be the hottest on Sunday (perhaps over 100 degrees) we’ll start earlier at 7:00am and end earlier, too, which will allow more much-needed time at the pool during the hottest part of the day.As for the remainder of Saturday, it was low-key, with some games, some chatter, and a movie (500 Days of Summer). Oh, and a nap or two. As for dinner, we were served a tremendous, generous meal by members of HUMC, starting with cheesecake Jell-O, vegetables and dip, and then baked potatoes, sweet green beans, rolls, and a main course of ham balls (giant meatballs of ground ham, hamburger, and sausage all smothered in BBQ sauce). Dessert was brownies and ice cream and by the time that rolled around, some people were too stuffed to even partake, including hard-working teens who were up on the roof all day long.

My Sheep Show Metaphor

It’s difficult to believe the trip is already more than half over, though that’s part of how a five-day mission trip goes, I suppose. I’ll leave you with an observation I had about the sheep show we attended on Friday night. If I use this as a sermon illustration down the road, I’ll ask you not to stand up and shout, “HEARD IT!” on that particular Sunday, dear reader.

During our evening processing time, we had our small groups discuss what happens when we enter into a competitive or judgmental nature when it comes to the work we do, how much we do, and how we do it. Did so-and-so do enough work, did this person work as hard as that other person did, and so on. When we enter into that comparison zone, we can lose sight of the focus of why we’re here: to help others with our labors and to help ourselves by learning from the process.

I watched that 4-H sheep show and listened to how the judge explained the call he made. For the pen-of-three contest, when a youth shows three sheep all together, the judge went through each trio and told of their specific merits and demerits. It was clear what he was looking for and why some trios rose to the top and why some didn’t. When he gave his criteria, he gave it to all of the competitors and the entire crowd (which likely has some adults who used to compete against each other in the very same contests when they were young). It wasn’t a blind decision with the reasoning unknown to the competitors. This judge turned the contest into a teachable moment everyone could learn from for next time. I think about the work we’re doing and how much teaching and patience goes into how we go about it and what we can learn from how the judge operated.

When one shows a pen-of-three, it’s not just the youth in charge of the sheep who goes out there trying to wrangle three sheep by his or herself. Other 4-Hers, their competitors, come out and help them. If you’re not showing in the round, you’re holding your competitor’s sheep. And you’re doing your best job. You’re not poking the sheep in the neck so it jumps. You’re not trying to sabotage. You’re showing good sportsmanship and taking it all in as a learning experience. When I spoke about this to the group, I asked them to imagine either the Minnetonka or Eden Prairie football teams choosing to offer water to each other at half time. I think about the work we’re doing and how it’s less about competing with each other to do the best job and more about doing the best job we as a group can do.

Finally, there were some sheep that just kept jumping around, bleating, misbehaving. That’s got to be frustrating, to raise these sheep for several months and do everything right only for the sheep to have a bad day when it comes time to be judged. How much work do we put into things only to have them not turn out the way we envisioned them? I think about the roofing work we’re doing in particular, and how we’re leaving the job uncompleted for other crews to help with, and whether we can be 100% okay with that or not. It can be tricky, if one lets it get to them.

And in the long run, there’s a whole lot of work that will need to be done – years’ worth, millions of dollars’ worth – long after we’ve left the area. It puts the whole thing in perspective. In the meantime, we get to do what we do and know that they couldn’t get to the next step without what we did. That doesn’t fuel our egos; that fuels our hearts.

That will do it for now. Your comments have been appreciated during our evening meetings and we hope you’ll keep them coming!

Regards,
Nate

Note: PHOTOS ARE UP!

Sprucing Up the Town Square of Verina, IA

We left HUMC at around 8:00am this morning and, after a brief visit from EUMC congregation member Art, who has a farm in the area, we drove out to Verina, IA (pronounced “Vare-eye-nah”) to do repair to the city park and City Hall. Verina is a very small town, bigger than Ware yet smaller than Poky. For a sense of geography, we were in the town square: on one side of the street is City Hall / Town Library, then the Fire Department, then the American Legion Hall. Across the street is the city park.

The group split up in two, with Alex N., Dan, Jacob, Kent, Loretta, and Trevor joining Mayor Chris on the roof of City Hall / Town Library to do re-shingling, while the rest of the group painted various items in the city park.

The shingling job is a tricky one to tackle. City Hall is a small building at only 25’ x 12’ yet an expansion to the building leaves workers dealing with two types of shingling. The wooden shingles on the expansion below the regular tar shingling gave them the most trouble today, as everything needs to be pried off and tossed in the waiting wagon below before the new boards, beams, and shingles can be laid. The group worked up on the roof all day in humid heat reaching the low 90s and only stopped first for lunch and later when it started raining. Actually, they didn’t stop when it started to rain; the work simply transformed into rushing to grab tarps to cover their work and beams to lash the tarps to so everything stayed where it needed to stay. By Kent’s estimate, around 80% of the shingle removal was completed by the end of the day. Tomorrow, they’ll finish the job and start laying the new shingles, perhaps with the help of some workers from the city.

The Verina city park, just across the street, saw Steve and Dave overseeing several work crews sprucing up the place. William and Olivia repainted all the wooden pillars of the picnic pavilion with a deep barn red. Alex O., Kelsey, and Molly painted the slide with a bright firetruck red. Hattie, Dana, Maggie, Anna, Katie, and I scrubbed away the paint chips on the merry-go-round and painted the bars blue and half the floor panels red (the other half get a coat of white paint tomorrow).

Sam scraped the paint off a giant bell so Kelsey, Molly, and Hattie could move on to paint it and its base red, white, and blue. Sam, Mitchell, and Justin scraped loose paint off a shed so most of the park crew could then coat it in primer and then repaint the whole thing white. The remaining painting for tomorrow includes the white panels for the merry-go-round, finishing painting the shed and the bell, and then we move on to clearing debris and tree trimming while on a lift. If time permits, I may swing down to Fonda with a few of our musically-inclined group members to check out the Opera Museum that Steve and I learned about on the historical marker map of the country just west of the American Legion (Steve and I have an affinity for those sorts of things and it was fun to discuss the various markers we’d come across around the country).

The Sun Rises in the Afternoon

I headed back to Poky in the mid-morning to fetch more paint and some paint thinner to take care of all the oil-based paint that had flecked on many of the painting crew. Geri and I met at the Farm & Home True Value for supplies and the not-thinking part of me who forgot to bring a hat to block that hot sun was grateful the thinking part of me picked up a few head bandannas while we were there. When we drove back to Verina, we got the painting crew (mostly) cleaned up and we had lunch at the American Legion Hall.

Lunch was an ample spread of “taco in a bag,” various tasty treats, and tubs of brainfreeze-inducing homemade fruit smoothies. Our meal was prepared by a local couple who was grateful for our work and they’ll prepare our meal for us tomorrow afternoon, as well. The amount of hospitality we’ve received on the trip so far has been just wonderful. It’s the sort of Christian hospitality example we all could learn from.

Our final mission trip group members arrived today. Brenda joined us in the middle of the day on the painting crew and around the time we got back to HUMC, Jake arrived to and our group of twenty-four was complete. We headed back into Poky a little earlier than we likely would have otherwise, thanks to the rain (and the heat, to an extent), showered up at the high school (now open to us) and took some time to relax (Apples to Apples, playing music, reading, chatting, and napping). Geri stopped by at 6:00pm to take our caravan to the county fair.

Sheep Shows, Petting Livestock, and Lamb Burgers

It was the night of the lamb show so that meant lamb burgers were the cuisine of the evening at the concession stand. Our group had our fair share of lamb burgers, nachos, chili dogs, fruit cups, ice cream, and homemade pie at the concession stand before sauntering over to the stands to check out the 4-H lamb show. We were in time to watch the heavyweight pen-of-three class and the championship, both of which were won by a young man named Nathan which made me happy, of course. I believe it was the first livestock showing attended by anyone in our group who is under 21 and the feedback I heard was positive, many of our youth fascinated by the shift in cultural norms. I had to laugh when two of our young women, Anna and Maggie, reported they overheard some local women in the stands wondering aloud if those “city kids” would even eat the lamb burgers.

Geri recruited a volunteer to show us around the fairgrounds and she gave us the scoop on 4-H, how the variety of handcraft exhibit classes in the Expo Building (which doubles as a community center and the place the local prom is held) are run and how things go on to the state fair, and then took us around to see all the livestock. The youth were fascinated by cows that would lick their hands with sandpaper tongues, pigs who grunted and wriggled their snouts, horses who demanded to be pet, the softest rabbits in the universe, and a cavalcade of chickens with beautiful plumage.

For me, walking around the fairgrounds flooded my mind with memories I hadn’t thought of in years. I thought of my days gone by of entering drawings, photographs, and vegetables in the county fair open class competitions, of watching my sister show horses and my brother show sheep and my friends show various livestock, of helping out at the 4-H food stand as a young man, and of having a photo of me as a 5-year-old win a blue ribbon at the Iowa State Fair back in 1984. The smells and sounds of everything from the bleating sheep to the cow barn to the din of the crowded Expo Hall made me a 15-year-old young man in the heat of summer all over again. The only thing missing was my old crew of high school buddies and our bikes all on the rack by the parking lot.

What Did We Do

We spent some time processing the work and the day as a whole in small groups set up by age – an adult group, a group made of incoming seniors, college students, and a recent college grad, and two high school groups led by Kent and me. We talked about things we did today we’d never done before (painting, doing work for other people, shingling, and for William, touching a horse!), what we learned today (4-H and rural culture, what the American Legion is, etc.), and what, beyond our jobs or studies or vocations are, our callings in life might be, particularly if we are called to serve others. It made for some excellent conversation before bedtime. Well, bedtime for many of the adults came sooner than the youth, who mostly stayed up for another hour to play some men vs. women Catchphrase (women won, 2-0).

Tomorrow’s plan is for the roofing crew to wake up and get back to Verina early with the rest of us departing around 8:00am again. Keep your blog comments coming and check out today’s photo gallery (today’s photos are courtesy of Kelsey, Kent, Loretta, and me).

Regards,
Nate

Note: I’m having trouble with the photo uploads and will get them up a.s.a.p. Thanks for your patience.

We also appreciate your comments on these blog posts! Each evening I read them out loud to the group like letters from home and they can really boost our spirits. Thanks in advance for your words of love and encouragement.

A Little Context…

This year’s trip takes us to North Central Iowa county of Pocahontas where we’ll do tornado damage clean-up and repair in towns and surrounding farmsteads. We’re staying in Hope UMC in Pocahontas (known locally as “Poky”) and traveling throughout the county to get our work done.

A severe storm system swept through the western portion of Pocahontas County on the evening of Saturday, April 9, 2011, creating a swath of tornadoes that cut through the lives of many residents. The dozens of tornadoes wiped farms clean off the map, ripped apart homes, and left debris all over the county in a path of destruction costing millions of dollars and putting life at a standstill for the county. By the grace of God, there were no fatalities that evening; the only two reported injuries were from a young boy whose arm was pinned and broken by a collapsing chimney, as well as a grandma who suffered internal injuries when her grandson squeezed her too tight as they took shelter.

And, of course, some homes were completely untouched. That’s the nature of these things, I suppose, though it certainly doesn’t mean lives weren’t touched. This is rural Iowa where having an abundance of extended family living and working in the same county is common. So while some of the Bunda family farms were left unscathed just outside Poky, for example, others were completely torn to shreds. And while an old high school in Ware, IA with classic architecture and a storied legacy still recalled by many residents across the county is stripped of its roof and will, unfortunately, have to be torn down, the trailer home across the street is still standing on its foundation and the woman who took shelter inside was unharmed. It’s this sort of randomness which can confound the situation all the more and leave residents asking the big questions.

Much of this preamble was unknown to us before we arrived. Our details on the overall picture were hazier than we’d had going into past mission trips which left the leadership crew both excited and with trepidations. That said, a little context for the overall picture may be helpful for you, dear reader, before I dive into the chronology of our trip.

“Go [South] West, Young Man.”

Twenty-two youth and adults from Excelsior UMC and Minnetonka UMC met at EUMC in the 1:00pm hour and packed up a caravan of four vehicles (two more people, Brenda and Jake, will each drive down separately tomorrow when their schedule allows). The caravan made its way southbound from Highway 41 to Highway 169. The most direct route was to take I-35, yet with road construction taking up much of that distance our new path was the way to go. My car hadn’t even left Excelsior yet before we realized we need to stopped for gas. With that immediate pit stop, we were separated from the rest of the group and took a slightly different route than the rest of the group and made it to Hope UMC in Poky first. Anna, Dana, Jacob, Maggie, and I poured out of Mazie the Mazda5 (making her third consecutive mission trip appearance!) and met our liaison for the week, Geri, who showed us around the church where we’re staying.

A Taste of Hope

Hope UMC is a medium-sized building with an average Sunday worship attendance of 100 people, according to Pastor Clare. That’s “Clare” as in “Clarence, not “Clair.” Kent let me ask a few women who popped in and out of the church during our first hour there whether they were “Pastor Claire” before telling me otherwise. Thanks, boss! Pastor Clare explained we were the third work group they’d hosted in the last month or so and we glad to have us. We have free reign of the building much of the weekend, save for Sunday worship time of course. The men reside in the (air conditioned!) sanctuary and the women are staying in the Friendship Room, a lounge-like space also sporting AC.

There’s a large kitchen and fellowship hall upstairs adjacent to the sanctuary where we’ll spend time gathering as a large group and preparing some meals. Showers are across the street past the old high school that’s being demolished and in the new high school just beyond the old one. A contingent of adults went there with Geri to shower tonight and while we had access to this brand-new building (students started using it only just this past March), the shower rooms were locked up. Geri will call the school tomorrow to figure out the situation and we went to her home to shower, as well as meet her son and his friends who were in the basement playing ping pong, foosball, and COD 5 (that’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, for the non-gamers).

When the rest of the group arrived, we settled in and had a meal of pizza from Casey’s General Store, a regular treat for those like me who grew up in Iowa and southern Minnesota and a new experience that received high marks from the “city slickers” of suburbia. Geri gave us some information on the situation (much of what she told us is above in my preamble), then she took us on a road tour of our work sites.

The Middle of Ware

Our first stop was Ware, IA, a small community of eleven people (now shrinking to 7) which is getting the unfortunate nickname “Were” because of the amount of tornado damage it sustained. We saw the aforementioned high school – a beautiful testament to days gone by – now likely needing to be torn down because of its now missing roof and lessened structural integrity.

Next door is a former teachers’ dormitory-style apartment building turned home. The man who lives there usually lives elsewhere in the summer for work and hasn’t returned to see the damage yet, too overwhelmed with emotion over what to do. Across the street is a house that’s no longer livable because it’s shifted from its foundation, while next door to it is a trailer home that looks to be in more or less good shape. Ware is a community facing poverty with annual property taxes of under $100 per year. Geri explained a home in Ware was up for sale in the paper a month before the tornadoes for $1,000 or best offer. These are people who are a tight-knit community and with just over half choosing to return, and that’s seven people remember, it’s becoming likelier Ware’s days are going to get tougher before they get easier again.

When All That Remains Are the Fields

Geri then took us to see some farms. The first one was simply a home in the country with fields around it. The home itself is beyond repair and the residents will go to live with family in the area. While we were there, a farmer named Mike stopped by to talk about the situation. His family has had hardship recently already, with Mike’s father battling lung cancer and Mike’s niece being diagnosed with cancer a merely a month before the tornadoes. He had positive comments about the clean-up effort, though, grateful for the efforts of local churches, schools, and other community organizations that have stepped up in the face of zero money from FEMA.

“Churches came and picked it up in short order,” Mike said. “It was just overwhelming… It means more to people, too, when it comes from the heart instead of having somebody getting paid to come out here. It makes all the difference.”

While Mike spoke about what happened to his neighbors and their property, I was struck by the way he referred to them. It was never “that farm over there” or “three farms up the road.” Mike said, “Clarence’s farm,” “Terry’s farm.” He put a human face on what happened and what’s still happening for these people. For people like Mike and others in the county, it’s been a hard year of course and also a good year, in terms of people meeting and interacting and banding together. Helping each other out, they were able to plant crops along with everyone else and their corn and beans are as tall as anyone else’s in their area of the state. That wouldn’t happen if Mike referred to “that farm over there.” It takes a personal connection to make something like that work because if the crop didn’t come in on top of all of this damage, I’d be scared to think what level of poverty would strike the county.

The next farms we went to weren’t farms anymore. The buildings were completely gone, mangled beyond recognition by the tornadoes and razed to clear the land for rebuilding. One farm had only a few trees left from its windbreak grove and one tree stripped bare and resembling a cross with its meager remaining branches, while another farm had only the home’s basement foundation there being repaired to rebuild. That farm received a lot of news coverage from the Des Moines TV stations, particularly the basement – which had a pick-up truck parked in it after the tornadoes.

Geri gave us two copies of the Pocahontas Record-Democrat / Buena Vista County Journal / Laurens Sun newspaper supplements from May detailing tales and photos from the tornado damage. It was startling to hold the newspaper supplement and see photos of ravaged farms, crushed combines, and decimated groves… then look up and see open fields where all those buildings stood, where all that debris was scattered, where those lives were forever changed. The only thing missing was a “before” photo of the farmsteads to truly get the full picture, though Geri said we’ll likely meet farmers who will gladly tell us their tales and show us photos of their land in its better days.

The Human Face of Disaster

It’s already clear it’s going to be the culmination of little stories which help make what happened here put a human face on the work we’re doing. A few interesting bits and pieces have already emerged:

When they pulled Cody’s truck out of the basement, he drove it around town a little bit, just for kicks.

When Jim emerged from his shelter, he had straw in his pocket.

Neighbors had to dig John out of his basement where he was taking shelter under a pool table and now sans shoes because the tornadoes that hit his house twice had sucked them right off his feet.

While sifting through his farm’s debris, a volunteer found Cody’s wedding ring which he had lost one year previous while remodeling his grandfather’s barn into a country roadside store.

When the Storm Lake, IA schools sent buses of teens to walk the fields and pick up all the debris, farmers with grizzled working hands and stoic lines cut in their faces broke down in tears at the outpouring of heart.

Geri’s house on the edge of Poky lost a few shingles and the sheriff pulled up the next morning to find all the neighbors in their row of houses on her roof doing repair, he was panicked, making sure everyone was safe after touring the country and seeing the destruction.

Pokie has “Mystery Tin,” a pile of barn red-tinted sheet metal debris of which absolutely no one in the county will claim ownership. How far miles did that metal fly to end up in Pocahontas, Iowa?

Many people were out of town when the tornadoes hit, or packed into storm shelters in packs up over a dozen. One couple – the wife having been through a tornado before – stayed in their concrete roofed storm shelter only to have that roof still be ripped away. Another family canceled their babysitters at the last minute and changed plans so no one was in the house when it was hit. And again, just two reported injuries, no deaths.

Some Personal Reflection

I asked several of the youth what they thought of the whole situation and consistently they were struck by the impact these storms had on the lives in this community. If anything, they are emotionally fueled up to get some good work in during our brief time in Pocahontas County.

While I never grew up on a farm, my father did, on his parents farm, and I spent a lot of time there in my life. I also grew up in a 300-person town and a 5000-person city so the rural setting is nothing new to me (the same goes for some of the adults on the trip). If anything, however, walking around farm grounds, smelling the crops, driving 20mph down all three blocks worth of main street’s business district, surveying for miles and miles to the sunset on the horizon and the rising moon behind us has brought back a flood of memories for me. It’s enough to make me want to pack up from the city and take my family to a quieter, s-l-o-w-e-r part of the world.

As for many of the youth on this mission trip, however, it’s their first time in a rural setting and it’s been fun listening to them observe cultural differences (“They don’t have a Target?!” “Their whole town population is as big as my graduating class!” “What’s 4H?”) as well as helping them learn about basic agronomy (“How do they cut down all that corn?” “What are soybeans?” “Is a hog confinement where they slaughter the pigs?”). It’s my hope experiencing a rural setting far away from Minnetonka, Chanhassen, Hopkins, Chaska, etc. will be just as enlightening and captivating as they work we do here.

Tomorrow we begin our work, painting and shingling. I’ll update as I can (the wifi is at Geri’s house and she’s playing liaison to several work groups in the area) and you can check out the photo gallery below, too. I encourage you to subscribe via email or RSS feed (don’t know what that is? Read this.) and keep up to date on our mission trip this year and EUMC news and musings year-round at FaithJourneyLifeJourney.org.

REMEMBER: Please leave your comments on blog entries and I will read them to the group like letters from home! J This is one of the highlights of mission trip evening worship!

Thanks for reading,

Nate Melcher
Director of Youth & Young Adult Ministries
Excelsior United Methodist Church

Regards,

Nate

I have mixed feelings about this. I appreciate the spirit of the postponement and how it allows for more dialogue on the matter. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like the people called United Methodists tend to funnel into the extreme center on many social issues… except one like this which allows a group of persons to be isolated, marginalized, and excluded.

Here’s the remarks I’d prepared on the original motion to be presented from the floor. We voted to postpone before I had the opportunity so I thought I’d post it here. If the legislation returns in 2012, perhaps I’ll get the chance to say this or something similar. Take a look, please (and part of it is based on something I learned in El Salvador which you can read about here):

I speak in favor of the motion. In March of last year, I had the blessing to travel with my seminary to El Salvador to march in solidarity with thousands of people from around the world to celebrate Archbishop Oscar Romero on the 30th anniversary of his assassination. While I was there, I learned about current US immigration policy and our cap of 20,000 immigrants per year, per country. For the Swedes and the Norwegians, this works fine, but not for the Salvadorans or Mexicans or Guatemalans and so on. For these peoples, the line to legally immigrant to the US isn’t just out the door, it’s down the block and around the corner. Six, seven, eight years is a long time to watch your children suffer in poverty.

I didn’t have to travel to El Salvador or learn about current US immigration policy, however, to know that defining someone by a one-word label like “Illegal” is exclusive, dismissive, and dehumanizing. Even if one uses this label because they can’t forgive someone’s breaking the law, that doesn’t mean the label isn’t hurtful. And even if one uses the label without meaning to hurt, that doesn’t take away the hurt.

If you have ever been dismissed, excluded, or had someone define you merely by one aspect of the things you are – an aspect they perceive as negative – please offer respect to persons who are not in the US by legal means and their allies who stand in solidarity when we tell you that to dismiss a population of men, women, and children as “Illegals” isn’t accurate. It’s hurtful. Thank you.

What do you think about the issue, Excelsior UMC? Speak your piece in the comments section.

-nm