ELCA young adults land on their feet

CHICAGO (ELCA) -- Every year young adults from the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) volunteer to take a huge leap of faith
and offer themselves in service in distant places. They pack their bags,
say goodbye to family and friends and embark on a life-changing journey.
The ELCA’s Young Adults in Global Mission program is a one-year
international mission opportunity for young people between the ages of 19
to 29 to learn about themselves, their relationship with God and their
place in God’s world.
When the program started in 1999, eight young adults volunteered in
the United Kingdom. Since then, more than 450 volunteers have
participated in the program, working with Lutheran companion churches and
organizations around the world. Young adults from other U.S. Christian
denominations also participate in the ELCA’s program.
In August 2013, 64 young adult volunteers will travel overseas to
serve with ELCA mission personnel in locations that include Africa, Asia,
Mexico, the Middle East and South America. The volunteers work 35 to 40
hours a week at a variety of placement sites including churches, schools
and hospitals.
“The goal of the program is to provide our ELCA young adults an
experience that allows them to be shaped and formed by the witness of our
global companions,” said the Rev. Heidi Torgerson, program director for
the ELCA Young Adults in Global Mission. “As they give themselves in
service in that global context, they are also developing as human beings
who can impact the ELCA and the United States’ wider culture when they
come back.”
“One of the things that makes people a good match for the program is
being able to let go of their traditional ideas of what success might be,
because that’s hard. So, we look for candidates who are emotionally
resilient and flexible and can sort of let go of themselves enough to
make cultural mistakes and make mistakes with language and really put
themselves in a place of learning and not be threatened by that,” said
Torgerson.
Many of the participants are recent college graduates who are
searching for the next steps to take in life and are looking for a
service opportunity before settling into chosen careers. Although they
enter the program wanting to make a difference in the lives of others,
the volunteers often discover that the difference happens within their
own lives, even impacting the direction of their careers upon returning
home.
“The experience deconstructed who I thought I was -- athlete,
student, successful, punctual, positive, teacher,” said Cristina Kinz, an
alumni of the program who served in Jose C Paz on the outskirts of Buenos
Aires, Argentina, from 2009 to 2010. “[It] left me to wrestle with who I
was when everything I had used to define myself no longer held much
weight in this new culture and language. I learned to receive and to
begin to discover myself in community with others.”
Now residing in Denver, Kinz said her experience overseas has
inspired her to teach English to people with another primary language.
Prior to becoming a volunteer, Kinz said she was “rattled with
questions about faith, God and humanity and found myself seeking
experiences which would let me weed through some of those questions.
(The) Young Adults in Global Mission appealed to me because of its
philosophy and practice of accompaniment.”
“I tried to go into the experience with as few expectations as
possible,” said Kinz. “One expectation I didn’t realize I had until
midway through the experience was that I thought that if I worked hard
enough, I could accomplish my goal of being great at accompaniment. It
doesn’t work that way.”
Kinz says learning to accept assistance from the community,
including her host family, wasn’t easy. Her host father, Omar, once asked
why she never allowed anyone to help her. “I was expecting to walk with
this community by trying, rather than by becoming vulnerable, learning to
receive help, and opening myself up to being held and loved in brokenness
rather than in strength.”
“Our culture tells us we have to have the answers and especially
folks who are coming right out of college, who have this resume focus.
(For those) who are willing enough to let go of some of these identity
pieces and say ‘alright, I’ll give myself to this experience and let go
of a little bit of control and see what happens.’ I don’t know if you can
couch that as a skill but that’s something we look for,” said Torgerson
“I learned about beauty, spirit, (and the) divine, and that it
exists in the eyes of every person I met, as well as in the small moments
where time seems to hold still just long enough to call me to presence,”
said Kinz. “I came home with a true sense that God exists simultaneously
in moments of suffering and joy. My understanding of God and faith
changed from something that needed to be explained to something that just
is,” said Kinz.
“I’m truly transformed by it,” said Stephanie Burkas, another
alumni of the program who served in South Africa from 2009 to 2010.
“You talk about this vulnerability, this lack of control that you
give up. There’s a sense of where someone signs up for service and you
sort of expect to be the one giving food or water or shelter. And I
showed up in Cape Town, and I was hungry and thirsty and lonely and was
quite literally fed and clothed and cared for,” said Berkas, who serves
as program specialist. She is also a student at the Lutheran School of
Theology at Chicago, one of eight ELCA seminaries.
For Lauren Borsa, who served as a volunteer in South Africa from
2009 to 2010, the year of service not only helped identify a career path,
it also taught her how to trust others for support.
“Being able to open up to people and rely on people I had never
known was very difficult for me,” said Borsa. “To give up that control of
(understanding that) I can’t do everything on my own, and I needed people
that were there to help me along the way. That was something that really
had an impact on me.”
Borsa is a senior program coordinator for Jhpiego, a non-profit
health organization affiliated with Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore. Her work focuses on healthcare for women and families in
developing countries.
“I was very humbled by my year of service,” said Borsa. “I tried to
imagine every person I met as Christ himself and tried to put that in
perspective of how I treated other people and how I wanted others to view
me. Because at the end of the day, I should show Christ to other people
through me.”

Lasting impressions
Although it’s been almost three years since Berkas completed her
year of service, she says she continues to “unpack” the gifts she learned
during that year.
“When I look at my daily life right now, there’s no way I’d be in
this job or even working here (at the ELCA churchwide organization) and
very likely not in seminary if it weren’t for this situation. But then
there are all these lifelong lessons that were learned from that. The
lessons I learned from that experience, I didn’t know I needed to learn.
It just came. God showed up in a whole lot of people during that year,”
said Burkas.
For Borsa, God showed up in a little girl she calls “Sarah”. For
several months, Borsa worked at a children’s hospital where she spent
much of the time caring for “Sarah,” whose parents abandoned her when she
was an infant. The little girl could barely move her arms and legs, so
Borsa spent a lot of the time holding her and reading to her. Plagued by
a number of health issues, the little girl was moved to a hospice where
she later died.
“I was a mess. I don’t know if I have ever cried so hard in my
entire life. It was one of those moments that I won’t forget her. The
impact her smile had on me and just even to know that I had spent (time)
with her in those last few weeks of her life, I still get chills. I had
named her in my mind and she was my child. I was just devastated.”
And for Kinz, God showed up in a little boy named Lautaro, who was 5
years old and living on the streets near Buenos Aires. Kinz spent
afternoons playing with “Lauti” who would only speak to her when he
wanted a snack. “He approached the world ready to fight and didn’t know
the difference between play and violence,” said Kinz. “The last morning
there, I went early to the community center. I remember walking down the
dirt road, the mist coming off of the ground, and I saw this little body
in the distance playing with an empty soda bottle. I got closer and
Lauti looked up at me and smiled and said, ‘Cristina!’ It was the first
and only time he said my name. I think that moment sums up my experience.
We all desire to be seen and called by name. Over the year, I wrestled
with my own identity and in community, found myself discovering who I was-
-Cristina--Child of God.”
“It’s super humbling to get to walk alongside these young people
for even a portion of their journeys,” said Torgerson. “Toward who’ve
they’ve been created to be in the world and get to share in some of the
questions and some of the struggles and some of the joys and gifts that
come with figuring out who the heck they are and figuring out the world
that God is calling them to. To being a blip on the screen of their
lives is such a gift.”