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0 As our Bruderhof volunteer Marion Zumpke heads to New York this late May weekend, we’d like to share a recent reflection she wrote about her time with Lydia’s House:
Growing up on an intentional community, I always believed that God had called me to that way of life. Although I still feel that to be true, stepping outside the community to work at Lydia’s House has helped me grow in my faith. I have put faces and names to the people Jesus referred to as the least of these. I have learned that some of them are the strongest people I know and even in the hardest of times they put a smile on their face and play with their kids. They bring a smile to my face when I think I’ve had a hard day. I have seen God’s love, the truest love there is, through the warm embrace of an innocent child who–although we only met minutes before–has decided that we are going to be best friends. Through this I have found that the suffering of the world, immense as it is, is where God is very close.
As a child I would sometimes visit a soup kitchen with some of my classmates and help serve a meal or mop the floor. I didn’t have much interaction with the poor because the town where we lived didn’t have lots of homeless people, so it was an eye-opening experience for me. As I got older though, I did less and less, occasionally helping Habitat for Humanity or helping move a food pantry. But I became indifferent and thought “If poor people would just work or try to get out of their bad situation, they would be fine.” Then I came to Lydia’s house and realized that I was pretty wrong. The guests that came through were people who had tried again and again but they had been dealt a hard hand. I realized that in order to fulfill God’s commands we have to help; we have to be examples of His love here on earth.
When I think of a role model for this way of living, I always think of Mother Teresa. I have always admired her service and dedication to her calling and that she blindly trusted God even when He didn’t seem close. I have seen this blind trusting here at Lydia’s house with the kids. They are so open to trusting new people. I think part of that is because they may never have had stability and when they come here there are so many friendly faces and they just feel loved. I think that children show us true love; they bring out the love of God in us because they are very close to His heart. The kids at Lydia’s House have shown me what it truly means to come to Jesus and trust him like a child in everyday life.
To truly love each other we have to be able to talk about hard things going on in our lives. In staff formation I appreciated going over the week’s events and realized that talking through the hard and happy moments helped me process life. If we come alongside each other with the love of God we can do so much more for the world around us. I had always thought this growing up in a community but it just showed me that it was all the truer when I came out here.
The suffering all over the world and right around us is so immense that sometimes it seems impossible to do anything about any of it. Remembering that Jesus says to love our neighbor as ourselves helped me to realize that some days that’s all we can do; serve others right here and now to hopefully help them have a better tomorrow. I think that doing the small things for others right around us and talking about life and encouraging one another is one way to help end the suffering of the world.
I believe that this is my blank page with God. To live with a real compassion for the poor, trust completely in God, and share life with other Christians to do the Lord’s work right in front of us. I think that God is constantly writing on our blank pages every day leading us by putting us in different circumstances and making it our choice to be a part of His work. Lydia’s House has shown me that if in the circumstances God puts us in we choose to serve others or comfort someone, play with a kid, or laugh with a mom who is having a difficult day, in that way we are truly living with and for God. Writing our story with God is a daily choice and it is in the little acts of love that we live out our faith and bring the kingdom closer.
