A Taste of Y-Corps

The majority of my personal growth over the past two years took place during seventeen total days: my two Y-Corps trips (about which I talk ENDLESSLY... and proudly).  As a product of those stolen days, I have these eighty hand-written pages of pain, prayers, and pride.  I also have these two excellent reflection sections at the end of each trip's daily sections; however, I haven't quite finished this year's reflection section.  See, when you get to about day 6, you begin to absolutely love your teammates and spend every second on the bus or before bed talking or singing or communing on some level.  Journal time limited to those moments when everyone else crashes on the bus.  To compensate, I put these little stars next to questions throughout my entries that I want to ask myself during the reflection period.  Three of them follow.  Please respond, comment, share your thoughts.  These questions can mean so much to your personal growth:

1.      About what issue will my children, fifty years from now, look me in the eye and ask, “How did you let that happen?”  Even more personally, at my twentieth high school reunion, about what will my friends and classmates look me in the eyes and ask me “How did you let that happen, Macy?”

2.      How can I be sure to continue to seek out new experiences throughout my life?

3.      What spirit fills my community?  How can I build that spirit?

I’d really like to answer the first question:

Service to the South this year explored the road of the Civil Rights Movement.  The crowd at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee swept me up and blocked me from reading all of the placards.  Yet on the very same trip, we played two-hand-touch football with kids from the Lower 9^th Ward in New Orleans who had neighbors drown across the street and we visited a rotational housing program from homeless families with small children. 

We cry in outrage at the actions of our ancestors that culminated in the movements of the 1960s.  But at the same time, we allow homelessness, hunger, hatred, and human degradation to occur on a daily basis.  We behave just as poorly as did those individuals in the ‘60’s, not out of evil intent, but out of laziness.

I do, though, feel like we’ve got a bit of a different situation.  Instead of one glaring, confronting issue, vital causes pull at our heartstrings from all around us.  We’ve grown up at a time of most beautiful challenge.  If we want to look our kids in the eyes, we’ve got to solve them all, or make an honest effort to affect our world.  Your child will have every right to look you in the eye with disgust about any number of issues: the treatment of homosexuals; hate crimes against Muslims; the destruction of the environment; the loss of reliable energy sources; the starvation of nations; the death of unaided internationals after liberty; and the homelessness, poverty, abuse, health issues, depression, emotional and religious death in our very own country.  However, they can only do this to you if you refuse to fight.  For something.  For anything.  For whatever you feel passionately about.  For your whole life.  For an hour a week. For a week a year.  Just fight.  For something.  I will literally get down on my hands and knees and beg you in front of the whole school if it means that you will use all those amazing abilities and resources that you have received to fight for something that leaves our world a better way.

And I suppose that answers the second question:

If you don’t fight for something, I will look you in the eye at our 20^th reunion and ask you how you let that happen.  I beg you to do the same for me.