‘Being in mission’ starts where you are

Boston Young Adult Volunteer experiences the joys and power of community

By Stuart Mapes | Mission Crossroads Magazine

Boston Food Justice YAVs (left to right) Sarah Jeanne Shimer, Stuart Mapes, and Mary Frances Yeilding helped glean apples at the end of the harvest season to be donated to food access organizations in the Greater Boston area. Photo provided

Work is an important part of vocation, but an equally important place to live out my calling is in my new home. My current home as a Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) is an intentional Christian community in Boston, where my fellow YAVs and I seek to build faithful relationships with each other, with our neighbors and with God. My year of service is teaching me that “being in mission” is a way of living that starts in the place where I eat, rest, reflect and pray with those closest to me.

My discernment toward becoming a YAV did not start with God calling me to leave everything and serve in a faraway place. Instead, I heard God asking to be invited into my life and calling me to be intentional about how I live. Becoming a YAV did take me away from where I grew up, but has also given me the opportunity to organize my life around service and ministry. Just as I look to God for guidance when I am at work volunteering, I look to God for guidance when I am at our YAV house, discerning how to spend time and money while building relationships with members of my community.

A key element of intentional community for Boston YAVs is preparing meals together using locally and ethically sourced ingredients. Photo by Mary Frances Yeilding

Hardly anything we do at the YAV house is more significant than nourishing and sustaining ourselves by eating. The YAV site in Boston is focused on food justice, the movement to promote equity, sustainability and nutrition in how we produce, distribute and consume our food. My fellow YAVs and I all work for organizations that address root causes of hunger, but we also live out food justice by carefully examining our own eating habits. Our community has been especially built around gathering at a table together and better understanding our relationship to our food system. In my home as a Boston Food Justice YAV, I hear God calling me to make decisions about food that benefit God’s people and God’s creation.

This year I am finding that my calling is not only about what I do, but also about who I am, what I live for and what matters to me. God asks to be invited into the place closest to my heart, into the relationships and practices that make me who I am. That place, my new home in community with other YAVs, is where I discern how God is calling me to live and intentionally use my gifts. Through consciousness about food justice and Christian reflection with my housemates, I am building an intentional Christian home, learning how to be a compassionate and hospitable member of my community, and answering God at my door.

This article is from the Spring 2018 issue of Mission Crossroads magazine, which is printed and mailed free to subscribers’ homes within the U.S. three times a year by Presbyterian World Mission. To subscribe, visit pcusa.org/missioncrossroads.

Be a YAV!
Are you discerning God’s call? To learn more about the Young Adult Volunteer program or to apply to the program, visit: youngadultvolunteers.org/apply. Apply by March 1 for international service and by June 1 for national service.