Last Monday during our weekly intern lunch and book discussion (we’re currently reading Beyond Charity: A Call to Christian Community Development by John Perkins), Chris (CHAT’s executive director) shared some troubling statistics from the city of Richmond. In the entire city of Richmond in the year 2007, out of over 6,000 pregnancies, 54% ended with abortions, and 64% of the children born that year were non-marital births. For the 2006-2007 school year, Richmond public schools had a 54% graduation rate, and 45% of students were 2-4 grade levels behind in reading.
These statistics are probably more extreme in several specific sections of Richmond, including in the East End, where Church Hill is located. It’s hard to hear these numbers while living here and observing some of these situations for ourselves, and understanding more and more that there is so much work yet to be done here.
The past two weeks have been quite challenging and tiring, especially this past week, the first official week of our time together with the street leaders (the 10 middle and high school CHAT kids who are interning with CHAT for the summer). This week was the first week of the day camp, a camp about 50 kids involved in CHAT that is run by many of the interns, and the entrepreneurship program (which I am participating in) in which two street leaders are paired up with a college intern to work on developing a small business in the community for the summer, to make money, develop relationships, and learn responsibility and important skills.
We’ve had a lot of fun this week, but the work is definitely a challenge. Hearing about some of my fellow interns’ difficult interactions with a few of the younger kids has broken my heart a little bit, because you know there’s a tough story behind almost every challenging interaction.
The more I learn about the decisions and sacrifices some of the core people involved in CHAT, and others in the community, have made here, simply out of a love for God and a love for their neighbors, the more I am blown away. In a conversation I was having with some of the other interns, we started realizing that the deeper we get into the summer, the more we get to know the kids as well as the adults, the more of our effort and time that we pour into people, the more we encounter the pain as well as the joys in Church Hill, the more we realize that there’s no going back. Once I’ve experienced this kind of community, I won’t just be able to forget about it at the end of the 10 weeks and go live my life. It certainly isn’t simple or easy to be a part of a community like this, but no one ever said following Jesus was easy. As John Perkins put it in “Beyond Charity,” “If living for God is not a challenge, not a struggle, not a risk, if it does not require giving of one’s self, then [the church] becomes stagnant and lifeless” (46).
This summer certainly involves those four things for me. Sometimes I feel that living for God is almost easier because of this internship—that’s not really true, but it is true that I don’t have to work that hard to seek out opportunities. What will be harder is continuing to find them out once the summer is over. But as I said, the further I get into the summer, the more I understand that this is not something you can just back away from. My hope is that I will learn to embrace the struggles and learn from them, and continue to put myself in intentional relationships with people who are different from me, because that’s part of how we grow together, and how we can demonstrate God’s love to a world that so often is hurting.
“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers...Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth” (1 John 3:18).
