Megan Jackson
Mission Year and Me
My name is Megan, I’m 20, I live in Bellingham, Washington, and I’m a graduate of Western Washington University hanging out and staying involved in a campus ministry. I have a chocolate lab “puppy,” two brothers, two parents, three roommates, and I live in the most beautiful place on earth. (At least, as far as I can tell.)
In three months, my life will be pretty different. My name will still be Megan, but I will be 21, living in Philadelphia, and doing Mission Year. The rest is a bit of a mystery. Life next year is a fluid and confusing concept, consisting mostly of question marks and a few excited, emphatic exclamation points.
What made me decide to leave the west coast (the only place I have ever lived) and move across the country to live in an inner-city neighborhood? To devote my life to loving God and people… completely unpaid? Many factors fed into this decision, but the biggest one was a combination of two books – the Bible, and Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. I grew up reading the Bible, but it was when I read Shane’s book on the floor of a hotel lobby as an impressionable 18-year-old that the Bible started to shake me up a little bit. I had considered what the bible says about God’s love for me (For God so loved ME that he gave up his son, right?) but God started to open my eyes up to the reality of his love for the world, for everyone around me, and especially for “the least of these.”
God turned my life upside down that year, and has been continuing that work ever since. He has been teaching me to die to myself, little by little, so that his kingdom work can be accomplished through me and in me. And, in a lot of ways, I’ve served him and crept out of my comfort zone into roles I wouldn’t have expected of myself.
But now I need to die a lot more. I can feel the call to GO, to be out of myself, to live with the people God loves and love them righteously with His holy and perfect love. I don’t want to just serve the poor, I want to live with them. And I don’t want to simply go to church, I want to be part of the body of Christ that transforms lives and communities outside of a building called a church. I don’t want to just read my bible, I want to swallow it and live it out loudly. And I want to learn to see the face of God in the faces of people I meet – the poor, the hurting, the oppressed, the hopeless – and the people I am not going to meet here, in my suburb of Seattle, my college bubble, or my Christian community on campus.
Sorry if that was a little longer than you were looking for. I have to admit, I was an English major, and I miss those 20-page essays.
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…
Megan Jackson's Blog
Thoughts on Neighbors, Friends, and Bridges. / Feb 14, 11:56 AM
I wrote this while brainstorming for a newsletter, but it was a bit too long-winded for that. And while I would gladly write newsletters that were three, four, five, or sixty-five pages long, I figured I would condense my material and blog it instead. I’m a terrible blogger anyway, and I need to do it more… especially now that I know people actually read this stuff. Here’s what I wrote:
Neighbors became our friends in the first few months of Mission Year; I have realized that they are now my family, the people I rely on and the people for whom I would do much. These relationships are totally mysterious to me, because while they are basically the entire point of Mission Year (I should have seen them coming) they don’t appear to make sense. Many of my friendships here in Philadelphia and in Logan are with women who are in a different age bracket than me. We have had radically different life experiences and are currently worried about very different things. (Me: I can’t figure out how to make a decent pot of rice. Her: the care of a grandchild. And the list of different concerns goes on.) While I have mostly only known the daily life of suburbia, the majority of my new friends have lived their whole lives in urban Philadelphia. We may both be Christians, but have worshipped in very different churches.
And yet – here is the mystery – these relationships exist, and actually have flourished. It was so much simpler for me to build friendships with people who were so like me in experience and age, in race, in religion, in musical taste, in education, in socioeconomic status. But my experience this year has changed my definition of friendship. While I previously looked for commonalities that could provide bridges from me to a person without much effort on my part (You love said obscure Indie band? I love them! Let’s be friends) I have been pushed to become a bridge builder, someone who reaches across the awkward gap (and it often is awkward) to communicate Namaste to my neighbor, to say the God who dwells in me recognizes the God who dwells in you, and I choose to love you despite myself. It is incredible to realize that the differences that once looked like insurmountable obstacles to a friendship are actually just creases in the fabric into which we both are woven. I learn about what it is to be a human and a child of God from these relationships, and that is a beautiful and necessary thing.
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Howard Thurman, The Work of Christmas / Dec 29, 12:24 PM
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the Kings and Princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins.
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry
To release the prisoner,
To teach the nations,
To bring Christ to all,
To make music in the heart.
Summary. / Dec 18, 09:37 PM
I’ve been trying to think of a blog to end my first trimester, kind of sum up what it’s meant to me. Nothing was coming to mind, until I stumbled on this e-mail I wrote to a friend over a month ago. Sometimes my own writing comes back and illuminates more than I realized at the time of writing. This e-mail was that moment for me today. So… here it is.
It’s so good to hear from you! Life is… oh man, life is crazy. I meet with my city director once a month, like a one-on-one. Last week we met and she asked me what God was doing. I sat there for a really time and finally answered, “I have no idea. But I know he’s doing something.” And that’s so hard to try to explain to people. The truth is that God is moving a ton in me. I can feel ideas and perspectives and other unnamed things in me shifting, being transformed. I know I am changing, but I honestly could not tell you how or what. It’s all so under the surface that I can’t name it. But I know it’s happening.
I guess the more God works in me the less I am able to talk about it. I sit down to journal and I end up lost in thought. I talk to people on the phone and I physically cannot shape words. Writing, once so easy, is often difficult. How do I describe this experience? How do I put my thoughts into words? Language is such a limited medium.
This is what I can tell you. I can tell you that this is really, REALLY hard. SO good, but so difficult. I’ve been out of my comfort zone before (thanks to CCF mostly) but I’ve never had my life stripped so painfully bare of all its retreats and comfortable corners. An image they (the staff, people trying to help us through this) give us is of standing naked in front of a mirror, especially when it comes to trying to live in community. Suddenly, all this ugliness in me is coming to surface. I’m coming to terms with my own brokenness and sinfulness – a concept I’ve somehow never had to deal with.
But they really stress our belovedness, the idea that as redeemed human beings we live inside the paradox of our brokenness colliding with our belovedness. This is where we stand – knowing our brokenness so that we can understand our desperate need for a savior, but learning to freely accept the reckless love and acceptance of God in our brokenness. We don’t need to earn grace – he gives it recklessly, left and right, if only we see it. We don’t need to improve ourselves, only live in the wonder of God’s love and salvation. It’s pretty radical stuff. It’s one of those truths that is sinking down into me slowly, worming its way into my heart. It’s a really transformational thing.
Sometimes I feel like I’m failing at Mission Year. I’m not bubbly and outgoing, so building relationships is difficult for me. I’m an introvert – I need my space! – so I struggle with sharing a tiny room with two other people and not having any space or freedom to do my own thing, make my own decisions, control my own time, and get away from community when I need a break. It’s so easy to compare myself to others, or to where I feel like I should be. But I’m living Mission Year. I’m obeying in the small things and repenting when I don’t. I am a work in process, always processing and letting my mind be blown. I’m praying like I’ve never prayed, and seeing God in places I never would have expected.
There it is. Have a wonderful holiday. Maybe I’ll blog over break…. internet in the house sounds glorious!
Bread / Nov 25, 11:03 AM
I grew up in church and over the years I have become very familiar with the spiritual rollercoaster we call “retreats,” “conferences,” “getaways,” or even “mission trips.” They are vacations, of sorts, where we gather to hear speakers impart their wisdom and religious fire into our hearts. Or, we serve others with a saint-like fervor, collapsing into a satisfied sleep at the end of every exhaustingly wonderful day. We worship at the top of our lungs, take tons of notes, sleep four or more to a room, wear sweatshirts, and boost each other into a spiritual high that gives us the confidence we need to change our entire lives to be more Christ-centered. We see our whole life through the humbling lens of conviction and make virtuous vows to ourselves. We leave changed.
Unfortunately, I rarely stayed that way. There were some important moments in my spiritual life that took place at camps in high school, and I won’t deny that. It was at my first high school camping trip that I made a commitment, independent of my upbringing and my family’s expectations, to follow Jesus with my whole heart from then on. It was at a winter retreat three years later where I prayed fervently about my doubts in Christianity and Jesus’ claims of divinity – and came to a place of peace and unshakable belief. But I think the danger for us as the American Church is a reliance on these highs to form our faith. They feel good in the moment, but don’t usually give us the strength we need to live out our everyday life with Jesus when we’re “out there,” in the busy world.
We have forgotten what it means to seek daily bread. The Israelites could only collect enough manna for their families for one day – when they attempted to stock up, it only rotted. They learned to rely on God’s daily provision – to count on it for life, day by day, moment by moment. But we are a Costco culture. Middle-class Americans like to go to warehouses and buy things in bulk, pounds and pounds of food at a time. It’s a safety, a defense mechanism, a convenience. And I think we treat spirituality like that. We seek God in bulk once or twice a year, storing up enough energy and conviction to last us the dry spells, taking notes to read later, making up for the prayers we meant to pray and didn’t. We try to grow in spurts and in leaps and in bounds.
I can treat church on Sundays like this, too. I worship and feel the Spirit. I pray fervently with my whole heart. I repent of not seeking God faithfully throughout the week. I feel myself filled with hope and love and reverence. I charge up like a battery – and I let it drain throughout the week, knowing I will be recharged again soon. It’s frightfully unhealthy.
I must stop.
Because I’m exhausted trying to get spirituality in bulk. It was never meant to be like that. When we pray for our daily bread, we are asking for enough for today. I am asking for the Spirit of God to fill me with Her joy and hope in my situation. I am asking for enough strength to live fully in the moment, with enough grace to hand out today. It’s okay if I run out when I collapse into desperate, unspoken prayers for help – because it’s always there for the taking, every day, every moment.
I am thinking so much about the line in The Lord’s Prayer where Jesus tells his disciples to pray simply for their daily bread. In Luke 9 (and Matthew 10 and Mark 6) Jesus sends the disciples out in pairs, taking no food or supplies. How counter-intuitive. They don’t stock up on granola bars or energy drinks or extra pairs of underwear or even bring money. They are forced to rely on the generosity of the people who hear their message and listen. They go out onto those Roman roads in reckless faith.
I am learning so much about God in the smallest moments of Mission Year. I am fed multiple times a day by the small graces in everyday things, in the commonest actions or words.
I am fed when a child at LOGAN Hope affirms a peer in love and acceptance. I am fed when a woman at the library smiles sheepishly and asks if I can put back the book she just pulled off the shelf. I am fed when an Indian man at work shows me pictures of his daughters and beams when I call them beautiful. I am fed when a teammate cleans up something I’ve left out – again and again and again. I am fed when old men nod at me respectfully on the street. I am fed when a Muslim man smiles because I’ve forgotten my wallet and tells me to take my purchase and come back the next day with my money – “because all things belong to Allah” anyway. I am fed with a verse or story that comes back to mind as I do the dishes or enter data into a computer. I am fed with the turning leaves and gifts of pizza slices and the feel of a piano key.
I am only fed enough grace for the moment. I am only given enough love to live each millisecond at a time, because it is all I need. The spiritual highs we get at highly charged retreats and conferences and camps are so fleeting. The inevitable dip back down leaves us feeling numb and confused. We doubt our convictions and our faith. We wonder if any of it is real.
And I’d like to tell you that it probably is. Retreats are great. I went on one last month that blew my mind wide open and is giving me new ways to connect with God. But we’re not batteries to be charged, or pantries to be stocked. If we rely on these highs, we lose the grace of the moment available to us. We lose sight of Jehovah Jirah, our provider, who gives us what we need in abundance, but doesn’t give us enough of himself to save for later.
I am learning to accept the everyday growth by millimeters that accompanies this recognition of my need for daily bread. Sometimes it seems like I’m not moving at all, and I become frustrated with myself or doubt the hand of God. But when I look behind me, I am shocked to discover that I’ve moved further down the path. I am always surprised to find that I’ve shed a selfish piece of myself further back on the road on which I’m crawling along. I am being made new, moment by moment, fractions at a time.
Why I'm Here. / Nov 3, 10:12 PM
There is a nice man who works at the Logan Library who is from Northern India, and he likes talking to me about life. The first time I got to speak to him we were in the back office working on different projects. He asked me if I was in school, why I had moved to Philadelphia, etc. I told him about LOGAN Hope and he was really interested.
“So, why are you here?” he finally asked me.
I went on to explain Mission Year, that it was a program that sent people my age into urban areas most affected by poverty and injustice. I told him that I was living with five other girls and that we were all trying to build relationships in the neighborhood and volunteer at different places in the community. I told him that it was for a year, and that we were raising support from back home so that we could be here doing this. I probably talked for about five or ten minutes trying to explain exactly what we were doing.
“Oh,” he said when I was finished. “I thought it might have been for the love of Christ.”
Oh… right.
“Oh. Right,” I said. “No… yeah, that’s it.” I felt very foolish.
That was a few weeks ago. I laugh about that story because it was something that I so needed to hear – but it was rather humbling to hear it! Somehow, Jesus got lost in the shuffle of Mission Year – in the work of service sites, in the monotony I let sink into my morning time with God, in the chore I made of neighborhood outreach on Saturdays. Mission Year became my job, like the military or a summer camp.
I forgot about Jesus.
I talked to the man at the library again today. He talked a little about his background, about his family, and about India. He proudly told me he was a born-again Pentecostal, from a family of Christians as far back as his grandparents.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget about the purpose of Mission Year when I’m at the library. I can breathe in books and lose myself in the work that is often tedious and mindless (and that I really love, for some strange reason). I hope my new friend will continue to remind me of Jesus – and why I’m here.
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