Oof, it’s been a while.
I believe my last post in this series had me talking about signing up for Mission Year. Wow, how am I going to cover that year in one post? Maybe I won’t.
I applied for this program out of a deep desire to find like-minded people who wanted to live out the words of Jesus. I selected Atlanta as my first choice for a placement because I had grown up in South Carolina and wanted to reconnect with my Southern roots.
Since Atlanta wasn’t a popular choice for people participating in the program, I was granted my first choice.
One day in the summer of 2009 I landed at the ATL airport, grabbed my suitcase, and walked out. I was met by a girl in a tie dye t-shirt. She was from California, of course.
In the car, we drove to the Atlanta inner suburb of East Point, which, despite its name, is just southwest of Atlanta proper. Once there, we pulled into a trailer park, and we were dropped off at a little White House at the top of a hill.
The girl who’d picked me up at the airport, Kelly, I learned, was going to be my team-leader. She was a few years older than I, with dark hair in a ponytail.
Next arrived the rest of my team, Chelsea, Kim, Rachael, and Andrew.
At least I wasn’t the only boy.
The house was a small two-bedroom. The girls would all sleep in one of the rooms, and Andrew and I would share the other.
Andrew, my roommate, would come to be an important person in my life. He was short with long blond hair, and he was a blues musician from Memphis, Tennessee. An exceptionally talented drummer, he also played guitar and put my own guitar skills to shame.
Oh well.
Our first few days together, we didn’t really know what to do. We were placed on a strict technology fast, the house had no television, and we weren’t allowed yet to go out by ourselves.
So we played games. We played Uno, poker, bluffing games, and any other card game you could think of. But our favorite was called Pictionary-Down-the-Lane.
It’s a simple game, and to play it all you need is stack of paper, equal in number to the number of players, and a pen for each person. Each person gets a stack of paper, and on the top one writes a word or phrase. Then everyone passes their whole stack to the left, and the next person is tasked with drawing what was written on the second piece of paper. Then the next person interprets what they think the drawing is, and so on, until the papers return to the original person.
Each stack of paper is then flipped through and read aloud to the whole group. It’s like telephone with pictures.
It’s simple; it’s stupid, but we had many hours of laughter and fun playing this game. It still holds a special place in my heart, but it doesn’t seem to resonate with other people the same way it does with me.
I guess that’s the power of nostalgia.
To say we got along well would be true. Over the course of the year, we had our disagreements and conflicts, to be sure, but we managed to work through those things and finish out the year as a united team.
The same can’t be said of the other Atlanta teams, however. But those aren’t my stories to tell.
Throughout that year I spent my days with these people. They became a family to me in a sense, when my true family was far away.
These were my first experiences as a young adult away from many of the difficult and stressful bonds of my fundamentalist upbringing, and so they are some of my fondest memories.
There’s so much more to be said, but I’ll leave it for next time.
Next time, I’ll fill you in on what our work was during that year. Don’t worry; grits and bacon feature heavily.
Until then, blessings.
Coffee & Theology 