Tuesdays on Broad Street: Week 5

      Two looong months ago, I began a Community Service Learning course for college, which required me to give 80 volunteer hours to two local NGOs or charities. Throughout the process, I had to record and share my experiences with others.

For my minor project, I served 20 hours (every Tuesday for five weeks) at the Augusta Care Pregnancy Center. I had no idea what this experience would teach me, yet every week when I sat down to blog, I was overwhelmed with all I had seen and heard. The words that came out of that messy heart were raw and honest. Some weeks I was angry at the injustice I saw. Some weeks I felt weighed down by the heavy, seemingly unsolvable issues. But other weeks, I walked away smiling hopefully.
I'm a few days late posting this final blog because every time I sat down to write it, my emotions and thoughts were as impossible to pin down as kites in a wind storm. So for now, I'll say a prayer and endeavor to complete the journey I started on a chilly Halloween morning seven weeks ago.

Week 5: Going With Joy

I woke up on Tuesday morning, sat up in bed, and immediately closed my eyes again. I don't want to go today, God. I know it's the last week, but I don't want to.

I sat in the darkness of my room. A pathetic amount of sunlight floated anemically through the slits of my closed blinds. I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and shivered grouchily. What's the point of going? How is anything I'm doing changing anything?

"Today, Lauren, I want you to have cheerfulness," a voice declared in my head. I knew it was the Holy Spirit because as anyone who knows me will attest, "cheerfulness" is the last word on my mind in the morning.

But something in my heart snapped to attention at the words, and my mind puzzled over the word cheerfulness. For all the wonderful deeds the Care Pregnancy Center does, to me, it hadn't really seemed like a place of cheerfulness. Each week I met another woman taken advantage of, another family abandoned by a man, another life destroyed by the ugly monsters of drug addiction, poverty, and joblessness. Each week I listened to stories of women and children enslaved by selfish appetites. I felt the battle for life and death raging over a woman who didn't want to be a mother and a baby who didn't ask for the circumstances it was born into.

How on earth was I to be cheerful in the midst of this?

I arrived at the CPC at 10:00a.m. and joined the small group of women for their daily morning prayer. It's here I usually hear the big stories of the past week, the eye-popping, heart-breaking, fist-clenching sagas that people are eager to share. But as the stories continued, I watched faces fall, lips slip downward, eyebrows scrunch inwards. Joy made a hasty retreat, and I honestly understood why. It felt wrong to smile in the face of all this darkness. Happiness felt insensitive, even offensive, to the suffering.

    And so, our time ended with another rant about how churches need to get more involved, how the government's sending the country to hell, and how tomorrow's kids are going to suffer because of today's parents.

     And maybe all those things are true, but goodness, where was the joy? The hope? The light? My heart pinched, and I thought quietly, "Something just isn't right."

Magazines on display in front of the counseling rooms

This morning I stood in church, watched a preteen boy gingerly light the third Advent candle, and recited a gentle liturgy that scrolled across the screen. The words bounced back and forth between leader and responders, a lone voice and a congregation, flowing together to describe that intangible word: joy.

In a song... in a belly filled... in being lost and then found.

The soft pink candle glowed spiritedly, an enthusiastic oddball among the three remaining purple candles. As I stood there leaning on the chair in front of me, I felt tears spring to my eyes. I thought about the darkness that has marked the past couple months of my life. And not just the darkness that I had seen in other places, like at the CPC, but the darkness that had been in my own heart. The long, silent battles for belief. The valley edges I'd tiptoed that had made stepping over seem a lot easier than climbing up.

But LIGHT had broken in my life. Jesus had broken into my life and is returning the joy of salvation that I'd lost. How could I, how dare I hide that joy from others?

When I got home, I looked up why the third candle is a different color and learned that rose is the liturgical color of joy. It makes sense to me that the joy candle should be a different color than the rest. Joy is meant to draw the eye and turn the head. Joy's very essence is to stand out and be seen. For "no one lights a (pink) candle and hides it under a bowl."

Calendar marking births and salvations at the CPC

I guess I'm saying all this at the end because this is my takeaway from my time at the Care Pregnancy Center. First, the world is a painfully, perpetually, unjustly dark place. Second, I must confront that darkness, be surrounded and engulfed by it because in recognizing darkness, I'm also recognizing my desperate need for light. Finally, I'm learning that I am not the light. I merely carry it. This was a hugely freeing revelation for me, because let me tell you, when I walk into a place thinking I'm the light, the Enemy snuffs me out quicker than a kid blowing out birthday candles.

But if I can remember that I'm a carrier of a greater Light, one that comes from a never-ending, powerful source, then I won't be overwhelmed or dismayed. Instead, I have the energy to confront the world's problems in new, more effective ways. I can use joy as a weapon that tears down strongholds in my city. And finally, I can fully understand the personal transformation God brings to my life as I love and serve other people.

Thank you for going on this service-learning journey with me! I invite you to get involved in whatever community/ministry opportunity God has for you and actively participate in the change He brings to your life through it.

For more info on Augusta Care Pregnancy Center, or how you can get involved, visit: www.augustacpc.org 

If you're looking for other volunteer opportunities in Augusta, Volunteer Match is a GREAT place to start. Lots of opportunities in tons of different areas.