This is us. Our team from Journey Fellowship on mission to Reynosa, Mexico with Strategic Alliance during the week between Christmas and New Year, 2023. Shown are friends I was blessed to get to know better during our six days together, the house we built for the family. Our new family: Oscar, Pilar, and Christian.
But to get here, you need to know.
- Why did I want to go
- How it came about
First. The why.
A not-so-brief background.
My history. From 1968-1986, I grew up in a blue-collar, working-class family living on a dirt road in rural Pennsylvania. I attended a county school filled with kids from the nearby college town as well as from the surrounding farming community. Most everyone was Anglo, of European descent: German, Czech, Polish, to name a few. Our schools, communities, and churches were predominately White. If I had to guess, my graduating class of about 230 had less than two percent Black, Asian, or mixed race.
1986 to 2010 encompassed my military career, taking me to places like the Philippines, Japan, Guam, Thailand, and Hong Kong, Singapore. Cultures and languages that were vastly different than mine. With Black and Latino roommates and Black, Filipino, Asian, and Latino co-workers, I now had new friends from all over the States with diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, and various shades of skin, hair, and eye color. After I married and kids came along, we had babysitters from all over the world: Philippines, Mexico, England, New Zealand, and Japan. Our kids went to schools in Corpus Christi, Japan, Guam, Mississippi, California, and Texas, where they were as often the minority as not.
Up to this point in my life, I had a curiosity about the different cultures, races, and backgrounds I experienced, but only in passing and mostly as they brushed up against my expectations, misconceptions, and prejudices. Raising kids and work demanded most of my attention, although I sought to raise them to treat everyone with dignity and respect.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of Mississippi where we lived. The aftermath opened the doors for us to work and minister to people who lived on the edges, those in poverty, and people who rarely had a safety net and had to survive by working “the system.” Suddenly our family and church were immersed in new relationships across racial and socio-economic boundaries.
We saw the ugly truth of racism, broken systems, and the culture of poverty. As we opened our church doors to kids who now lived in a FEMA trailer park nearby, I was filled with compassion towards the families who fell through the cracks, who didn’t own a home that had been damaged or destroyed, but rather in apartments or rentals that had been. People who didn’t have insurance or qualify for loans, grants, or rebuilding assistance. People whose minimum wage jobs were gone, whose cars had been flooded and who no longer had reliable transportation or any transportation for that matter. In an unexpected situation, we opened our home to a young man who had been recently released from prison, and for several years he became one of our family as we helped him find a job, expunge his record, and obtain a driver’s license.
In the midst of it all, started reading—because that’s what I do—and asking questions, wanting to hear the stories of those now within my sphere. How did they get to the place they were at? What help was available to them? What were churches doing in response? Did the local, state, and federal government provide adequate support? I consumed books on poverty, race, and homelessness. I felt like I was learning, stretching, doing a tiny bit of what Jesus calls us to do: to love one’s neighbor, love one’s enemies, and care for the least of these: widows, orphans, poor, prisoners. (Verses below are taken from the NIV)
- Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress (James 1:17)
- Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. (Isaiah 10:1-2)
- Do not deny justice to your poor people in their lawsuits. Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners because you were foreigners in Egypt. (Exodus 23:6,9)
- Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked. (Psalm 82:3-4)
- But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, 14 and you will be blessed. (Luke 14:13-14)
- But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, (Matthew 5:43)
- Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Matthew 22:37-39)
You can find a list of the books I read HERE.
After we retired from the military in 2008 and 2010, we moved to Central Texas. Something shifted during the move and as we settled in our new home in the suburbs and military town of Schertz/San Antonio and became involved in our new church, I knew our ministry was shifting also. Thankfully, the Lord placed us in a church that—when I looked around—I knew I wanted to be because many of those I worshipped with didn’t look like me. Even though I had stepped away from working with the least of these, with new friends from all over the States with diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, and various shades of skin, hair, and eye color, I knew I still had much to learn in this new place.
tablets of human hearts 