Hi, my name is Kelly Crabtree, I am
here today with Jarred Ervin and Margaret Clinch and we are members of the
Episcopal Service Corps-Maryland this year. We are here today to share our
stories. Sharing, listening and understanding personal narratives are key for
communities, especially church communities. After all we read stories every
Sunday, so why shouldn’t also share our own with one another? To share, listen
and understand these stories allows us to deepen in our relationships with one
another and grow together as a community. Our service corps community has
definitely experienced this so far within our year and hope to illustrate some
of this to you with our own personal narratives we are going to describe today.
We are each going to tell you how we came to the Service Corps as well as how
this year of our lives has played out thus far. We hope that this propels all
of us to share, listen, and understand with all our hearts of what our Church
is really capable of doing in our world today.
So, I am originally from NW
Washington, DC, born and raised. I was baptized Methodist, but my family did
not stay long in the Methodist church. Eventually my parents no longer wanted
to deal with the weekly Sunday struggle of getting my brother and I to Sunday
School, and my parents did not have a strong connection to the Methodist parish
at the time, so we took a break from the church. A couple years later, when I
was about 12, my parents decided on instead of choosing based on denomination,
we were going to look in terms of geography!
So exactly one block away from our
house is St. Columba’s Episcopal Church and that is where we went!
St. C’s quickly became the right
home for my family. I entered the Rite 13 program, with instead of a mom
pushing me to go no matter what, to an approach that put it more into my hands.
I was to give it a try for a month or so and then decide whether or not I was
going keep going. I didn’t realize this until now, but my mom put my spiritual
journey into my own hands at that point, and this is what allowed me to claim
my faith for my own. I finished Rite 13, continued onto to J2A going on the
life-changing Pilgrimage and then finishing with YAC. Throughout my time in the
youth program I learned about myself in a way that was completely new to me.
Some of most important teachings that came out of this time for me was the
following:
-My faith is personal, there is no
right or wrong. It’s mine to own to claim and no one else can do that for me.
-Acting my faith had the deepest
meaning to me in service. We are God’s hands and feet in the world.
and lastly,
-I am meant to be in community.
This is how I deepen my faith, strengthen my core and find the most support in
my life.
These lessons were both learned
inside and outside the Sunday school classroom. I could go on and on about all
the experiences I had, but I want to highlight one of them.
This is the first Mission Trip I
went on with St. C’s. I went to North Dakota, with six other young persons and
four adult leaders, to an Indian Reservation. We spent a week in community with
one another and another community from Pennsylvania. There we helped with home
repairs for two families on the reservation. I entered this trip completely
unsure of my capabilities, and myself but found that the strength of my faith
community I was with and the importance of our service for this week to overcame
all of my insecurities. Therefore, I went away from this week knowing truly
where I am called to in the church. After this experience, I continued to go on
service trips every summer, and now I lead them. I have gone to the Gulf Coast
doing hurricane Katrina and Ike relief, revisited North Dakota, and now the
past four years have been going to West Virginia on St. Columba’s Appalachian
project. On all of these trips, we build
a week-long community of worship, service to others and developing
relationships. And this was one of the foundations that I brought with me into
this year with me.
So the two main reasons I felt as
though the Episcopal Service Corps was the path I was called to after college,
was because of faith community you build for a year coupled with the dedication
to service, which I felt mirrored the mission trips I went on. While, these
still remain true for the year, they have been changed and transformed into
ways that I had never anticipated.
The start of my year was rough; I
lost a beloved pet, was very ill in the beginning, lost my grandmother and had
various family affairs going on. I was not present in the community and my
beginning experiences really tested me in terms of allowing a new group of
people into my life, when I was feeling so raw. Though eventually I was able to
open up and come to appreciate what we were constructing with one another. Our
community definitely has not had the easiest time coming together, but in
reality no community is perfect. It is a constant roller coaster ride, with
twists and turns you never expect. But with these surprises and changes comes
growth and that is something I have cherished from my time in the Episcopal
Service Corps. I have grown to understand myself in an enlightening way, I have
grown deeper into my faith journey- I have actually just completed the course
to become confirmed in the Epsicopal Church and then I have grown
professionally-really finding my cause in this world.
I am serving at Great Kids Farm in
Catonsville- where I am the Assistant Farmer. Great Kids Farm is a Baltimore
City Public School campus, that is a fully functioning production farm as well
as an educational farm. We work to get fresh organic produce grown by city
school students into city school cafeterias. We also work to educate students
on healthy eating, living and growing their own food. I have learned a lot more
than how to grow food from this job that I can’t even begin to describe. This
place has brought me so much joy, light and love into my life that I will
cherish with me every day after this year is completed.
This year has allowed me to find a
way to live out my faith with the gifts given to me by God. And this is what I
am truly grateful for. As Romans chapter 12 says, “For as in one body we have
many members, and not all the members have the same function, we who are many
are one body in Christ and individually we are members one of another. We have
gifts that differ according to the grace give to us.” Find your gifts, cherish
them and act of them because no one else, but you can.
Thank you for listening to my story.
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