Kelly Cefalu
The who, what, when, where, why
Who?
For those of you who don’t know me, I am Kelly Cefalu. I love dark chocolate, pomegranates, drinking tea, riding my bike, and recycling. My fingernails are often painted lime green. I love the smell of the beach and digging for sand crabs. I could spend hours on the swings. I can be patient and quiet, and I can also get quite passionate about issues/topics/flavors of ice cream.
As for the other vital stats, I graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 2008 with a degree in history (specifically Latin American and Native American). After graduation I spent a few weeks traveling in Europe with one of my best friends, followed by 3 months living in a poor part of Quito, Ecuador volunteering with a small local organization called UBECI. For the past 7 months I have been enjoying living with my family in Sunnyvale, CA, making some money babysitting/house-sitting/dog-sitting (although not actually sitting very often), volunteering with my church’s high school youth group, reading, and spending time with people I love.
What am I doing?
Mission Year is a faith based service organization dedicated to mobilizing young Christians to give a year of serving the urban poor as neighbors (learn more at www.missionyear.org).
When?
Beginning later in August, 2009 through August 1, 2010.
Where?
I’ll let you know when I find out but the cities Mission Year places teams in are scattered around the country (although none of them are located in my home state of California).
Why?
To that I respond, why not?
I had no real plans for the next year (or any year) of my life and I was eager for an opportunity to simplify my life and deepen my faith through service and community. Everything I was reading, conversations I was having, sermons I heard seemed to line up when I visited Mission Year’s website for the first time.
As I learned more about Mission Year, I felt more and more certain that this is exactly what I am supposed to be doing right now. Mission Year’s integrity as a faith based organization inspired me and it often seemed as if someone had transcribed my thoughts. For example, the Mission Year “basics,” as they call them, are community service, church partnership, relational impact, justice, christian community, and personal discipleship. If you know me well, hopefully you can see why I was excited about the opportunity to participate.
One thing I want to make clear as to why I am doing this: this is not a year of volunteering before I start my “real” life. This is training and preparation for the missional lifestyle I hope to maintain for the duration of my life. The commitment to God, service, justice, relationships, and community is a lifelong commitment.
Over the next 12 months I will do my best to update this blog with stories, moments to share, prayer requests, and general info about how me and my team are doing. Unfortunately I won’t have much time to keep in touch on an individual basis, but please feel free to email me and keep up with the blog!
About Mission Year
Mission Year is a year long urban ministry program focused on Christian service and discipleship. We take teams of young people, place them in an area of need, and help them to serve people and create community. We are committed to the command of Jesus to “love God and love people,” by placing the needs of our neighbors first and developing committed disciples of Christ with a heart for the poor. Learn more about our first year program…
Kelly Cefalu's Blog
Dream Big / Jun 30, 05:54 AM
Every week of summer camp we go on a field trip. The kids get incredibly excited and are always asking where we’re going. We warn them the first week of camp that the location of the field trip is a surprise and if they ask us, we are likely to try to trick them. Sometimes we say we’ll be scrubbing the bathrooms with toothbrushes, other times we try to trick them with outlandish ideas. I am new to this summer camp program, and so when the kids were asking where we were going, I tried to come up with something completely ridiculous and impossible. Something I was sure they would never believe. So the other day as I was driving my first van load to camp, someone asked (or maybe I came up with it, I can’t remember) if we were going to South Africa to see Mexico play in the first game of the world cup, and I said yes. I told them it’s a long flight so we would have to leave on Wednesday if we wanted to make the game. Crazy right?
Apparently not. A team mate later told me that the kids in her class informed her that they were going to South Africa for the world cup. Maybe they didn’t really believe me and were just entertaining the idea, because it is pretty exciting. But maybe they did. Anyway, my first thought was, really? How gullible can they be? Will they believe anything?
Then I thought more about it. What if they just dream bigger than I do? What if their imaginations are not yet limited in the ways that mine are now? Maybe I could learn something from them, maybe they can teach Miss Kelly yet another lesson, how to dream big.
Now I’m not trying to say it’s good to get kids hopes up to unrealistic levels, or that a dose of realism isn’t a good thing now and then. But I think I often take that too far. I end up limiting God and myself. And when that happens, I think I can end up missing out on some pretty great things because they seem impossible.
Anyway, that’s just a random story/thought I’d been having and I decided to share. Although I only have 6 weeks here I’ll do my best to share more often!!
June newsletter / Jun 15, 05:06 PM
After our orientation back in September I remember thinking, even writing in my newsletter, that I had been changed. I was so convicted and passionate that I believed I would not return home the same person even if I left that day. I was still caught up in the mountain top experience of orientation.
Now, with only a month and a half to go, I wonder how much I have really changed. I wonder too, what real change really means. Does it happen quickly or does it take time? I think that sometimes, lives can be changed in an instant and a single event can alter a person so deeply that they are forever changed. But the change I was looking for this year, the change I thought I had experienced at orientation takes more time.
I wanted desperately to pursue justice in a low-income community, to be the hands and feet of Jesus among the poor, to practice living simply, and to learn from and learn to live well within community. Once the year got started, however, I realized that these are wonderful ideas but are practically very hard for me to live out.
So now that I have had some time, have I actually changed? Yes. Am I done changing? Not even close. For starters, I have learned a great deal about myself and how I react, poorly and well, in various situations. I have become more sensitive to the ways my words can hurt people and I try, though I often fail, to put my pride and selfish instincts aside. I have begun to pray more intentionally and I speak to God more honestly. And I believe I do a better job loving people that I live with.
From my community I have learned about the struggles of being an immigrant, which has inspired me to further research immigration law. I have seen desperation and generosity and I now see why people say those who have the least are often the most generous. So I have become more generous, though this is a hard change for me to make. I have also seen a change in the way my team and I interact with our neighbors. We give and receive more invitations now, to eat, to play, to sit. One neighbor invited me over just because she had not seen me much since she went back to work. We are becoming part of each other’s lives, and that is a change that could not have happened without time.
But these changes did not only take time, they took intentionality. It is not enough to move into a neighborhood or to move into a house with other people. We have to want to change, and we have to sacrifice daily to make it happen, because if change were easy we would never be transformed.
As I think about the next month and a half, I try to recognize not only how far I have come, but that I am not finished changing yet as a person, a neighbor and a teammate. Likewise I must say thank you for your prayers and financial support, which have sustained me up to this point, but I’m not finished yet so keep ‘em coming!
A springtime blog / Apr 16, 09:06 AM
This is something I wrote for my April newsletter and I wanted to share it. So here’s a little update on the first week of spring in East Point:
When I left Georgia to head home for Spring Break two weeks ago, the scenery was what one would expect during the winter months. The trees were bare, the grass was yellow (apparently in other places outside California it does that in the winter), and looking outside I saw mostly brown with the exception of a few blossoms beginning to appear. Last Sunday when I returned, I felt like the plane must have landed in the wrong place. Everywhere I turned I saw shades of green. Spring didn’t just arrive, it took over.
Perhaps this extreme change in scenery is a sign of what is to come during the last 31/2 months of Mission Year. We have seen seasons come and go this year, from the tail end of summer into fall and then winter. But none have come so suddenly. In the same way this year has been full transitions. From the initial shock and excitement of arrival to settling into the neighborhood to the past few months of really beginning to invest in our community. Recently, however, we seem to have jumped into a new season of Mission Year. We have moved from connections with kids to friendships with families. At our worksites we are experienced leaders rather than newcomers. With each other, we are diving into the deep waters of family. None of this is to say that the rain will not come. We all know that spring is not just sunshine and flowers, but I am so excited for these next few months in East Point.
Spring has also brought change to the trailer park beyond the sudden greenery and warm weather. A few weeks ago we awoke to the sight of cement trucks and tractors rolling down the street to repair the multitude of potholes that litter the roads. One corner in particular had a ditch so huge I worried each time I drove the kids home (the picture to the left is of me standing on the newly paved corner). It was exciting to see a real problem addressed in a low-income neighborhood, but the reality is that filling the holes is only a band-aid. To truly repair the roads would require tearing out the old roads and paving new ones.
As we enter this final trimester, my team and I are trying to keep this same principle in mind. We do not want to leave a bandaged neighborhood with wounds that will only re-open when we leave, but we also remember that we are not the ultimate healers. What we seek is to build relationships and to be a part of God’s ultimate healing process.
“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?”
–Isaiah 43:19
the kingdom of God belongs to such as these... / Apr 2, 12:35 PM
I guess Henri Nouwen inspires me to blog, because here I am again sitting in front on a computer to write a blog, for only the second time all trimester, and I’m about to quote Henri Nouwen again. Recently I was, yet again, reading !Gracias!, his published journal from his travels in South America, and something he wrote reminded me of my experience here. In this particular entry, Nouwen was writing about children. He wrote: “The children always inspire me to live in the present… Their uninhibited expression of affection and their willingness to receive it pull me directly into the moment and invite me to celebrate life where it is found.”
OK, I have to admit that I often feel something less than inspired by the children I spend hours with every day. That something might look a little more like frustration or exhaustion. Last Saturday, however, I was in total agreement with Nouwen here. I was present, I was nowhere but right where I was, and I was with a whole bunch of kids. It was a beautiful day, a true spring day, and I had taken a group of kinds to a block party hosted by a school down the street. Several times that afternoon, at the party and outside our house afterward, I was captured by the faces of these beloved children. I was reminded why I am here. When I saw Abdias’ face filled with pure joy as he bounced around in the jump house, when I picked up Joana at her house and her eyes lit up when she came to the door, when Marlen successfully threw the frisbee to me and smiled so brightly I could have sworn it was God smiling, when Efren saw me and said “Miss Kelly!” and then gave me the biggest hug he could for a kid so small… In these moments children inspired me to live in the present. It was just as Nouwen described it. They pulled me into the moment with a force stronger than gravity.
Maybe I don’t always feel inspired by the kids I live, work, and play with every week, but sometimes I do. Last Saturday I celebrated life with the children and at the end of the day, though I may have been physically tired, I was spiritually filled because of their joy.
“But Jesus called the little children to him and said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’” (Luke 18:16-17)
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How to find the motivation / Feb 8, 11:29 PM
I have not blogged in a long time. I have been distracted and tired and sort of waiting for something profound to write about. But this will have to do.
As the second trimester of Mission year began (I can’t quite say it is beginning still because we have been here for a month now), we talked a lot about the fact that this trimester is a long one. The newness has worn off, there is no big light at the end of the tunnel yet (no long break or summer/end of the year excitement). There is just us, me and the 5 people I live with. Just us living in our neighborhood, working all week and sleeping all Sabbath. There is just us and cold, dreary winter weather (I am definitely not in Sunnyvale anymore). How do we find motivation? How we we remember why we are here when we are tired and annoyed with our team mates and sick? (right now I feel pretty crappy with a headache and a cold, and please note that I am often very happy and excited to be here and in love with my team… but not always).
I have found the answer to this question of motivation in sometimes the most obvious places, and other times the answer has found me when I least expected it.
Part of the answer has been learning to be motivated and energized by small moments of joy and love. Last week I showed the kids how to make bug catchers and we ran around a park at the afterschool program hunting for spiders and bugs. It was awesome. Recently I have had some late night convos with a team mate who, at the beginning of the year, I would have never thought we would get along. I am amazed in those moments of what God can do and why I decided to participate in a community that I had no say in choosing. Sometimes it is as simple as a smile from a child, a really good breakfast, a good hair day, or an encouraging text message from a friend. We do not often get those big, mountain top moments but we do often get whispers of peace and moments of joy in a busy day.
Another part of the answer has been in the quiet moments I have with my Savior when He meets me in the midst of my exhaustion and frustration. Last Wednesday I felt sick and tired and frustrated and cold. I had tried to have a quiet time in the morning but it felt unproductive. Then I opened up a book my friend had let me borrow several months ago, but I hadn’t opened it since last year. One of the first things I read was this:
“My hour in the Carmelite chapel is more important that I can fully know myself. It is not an hour of deep prayer, nor a time in which I experience a special closeness to God; it is not a period of serious attentiveness to the divine mysteries. I wish it were! On the contrary, it is full of distractions, inner restlessness, sleepiness, confusion, and boredom. It seldom, if ever, pleases my senses. But the simple fact of being for one hour in the presence of the Lord and showing him all that I feel, think, sense, and experience, without trying to hide anything, must please him.” (Henri Nouwen, )
I read this and thought really? It’s ok that I don’t have intense times of prayer and that I’m distracted and tired and everything else while I’m trying to be with God? It’s ok that I’m just me? At some point along this journey of faith someone told me (or I gathered from some source) that “quiet times” were required every day and I should read the Bible and pray and think of only “holy’” things. This would make me a good Christian. And I’m on Mission Year… I have to be a good Christian (really, somewhere in my psyche I believed this). Especially if I’m a team leader. Maybe everyone else already figured this out, but I needed to hear that message from Henri Nouwen. He writes later “God is greater than my senses, greater than my thoughts, greater than my heart.” If I were to try to be anything but exactly what I am when I come to meet God, I would be a fool. And who I am is God’s beloved daughter, wreck that I am.
This realization has allowed me to be more honest with God. And in that honesty I find great peace, which brings me back to answering the question: How to stay motivated? This freedom to find Joy and Love in the small things and to find Peace in just being myself has helped me stay motivated. It helps me to not just get through the day, but to see God work in me and those around me through the day. And that, I believe, is why I’m here, on Earth, in East Point.
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