Email: Jessie Jennette

Friends,

You go nowhere by accident. Wherever you go, God is sending you. Wherever you are God has put you there. God has a purpose in you being there. Christ who indwells you has something to do through you where you are. Believe this and go in God’s grace, power and love.
- Anonymous

I don’t know if any of you have had the opportunity to live in the unique world of volunteers, but in a community of people with very little money and no anchors other than each other and God, life becomes a much more fluid concept. From this fluidity stems a new way of approaching everything—from handling a small crisis of not having a spoon available to eat your grapefruit and yogurt, to managing a small crisis in the workplace. I tend to favor the traditional way of dealing with these little setbacks.

Oh, wouldn’t it figure. No spoon for my breakfast. I guess we’ll just have to get creative. I didn’t know this from experience, but a grapefruit can be peeled like an orange, using a knife to take off the excess rind, while yogurt can be drunk with a straw, unless you have fruit on the bottom, in which case, you’re stuck with a constipated straw.

Some of the people here, however, have a different type of reaction. Something more along the lines of:

 “No spoons? Well, I guess I was meant to have eggs this morning.”

These people rarely think, “was it something I did wrong; is karma now exacting its revenge on me in the form of me not having a spoon?” “Is there someone else to blame for my misfortune?” like the rest of us so often do. Instead they think, “It was meant to be.” And this odd behavior is not limited to reactions to unfavorable events. It is also applied in things like the decision-making process.

When it comes to one of those fork decisions, the ones that you can’t get around by compromising or deferring to someone else, you have to choose one way or the other and live with the results. In dealing with these decisions, some people go through a process of over-examining the options, fretting, second-guessing themselves, feeling alone, worrying and fretting some more before and/or after the decision in question has been made.  Then they spend time rebuking themselves if they feel they took the wrong fork in the road.

Others, not including all or limited to long-term volunteers, see each decision they make as a step toward the great, unknown destination that’s been laid before them. Every situation has purpose, is intentional. These individuals walk around with a different demeanor. You can see it sometimes on their faces; their perspective is altered from the norm.

The quote above was given to me by the village managers of Houma, Louisiana, “Good Earth Volunteer Village” before they came to the end of their commitment on the Gulf Coast and Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. It’s fitting that these two “long-termers” would share a sentiment like this—inspiring uncanny confidence in every event that we may encounter. The word that might sum up this perplexing phenomenon that has captured so many is faith. If you have it, the world is altered, less frightening, more manageable. If you opt not to use it, life is an uphill battle all day, every day—walking five miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways. So answer me this, why does it take so long to figure out something so simple?

With love,

One meant to have eggs but instead drinks yogurt with a straw,

Jessie