Sunday, August 8, 2021

Why I Go on ASP

If you already know me, you know that I am a high school teacher and that this past school year was...not easy. If ever there was a year to take the summer completely off and stare into space for ten weeks, it was this year. But on July 4th, I found myself--once again--in a big white van full of teenagers on the way to Kentucky. The first time I made such a journey was when I was 14 years old, and since then, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve gone back on ASP. These days, I sit up by the steering wheel with a GPS soundtrack instead of jammed into the furthest back row with three good friends and a pile of pillows and cassette tapes of REM and The Cure, but the essentials are the same. ASP isn’t easy, but there are reasons why I keep going, and the apostle Peter and Julie want me to give you an account for what it is that keeps bringing me back. This morning, I’d like to share why I keep going back to ASP.


The first reason is that it’s always an adventure. This year we had the new struggle of trying to follow Covid procedures and figuring out how to navigate the logistics of the center, which meant that the females in the group were staying in a place accessible only by van, separate from the men and the campus where dinner and evening gatherings were. And devotions and materials were somewhere else. And breakfast was in town. The first two days had an additional layer of “Where should I be right now? And where should the van be? And how can we supervise all of these different areas with at least two adults in each one? ...Where should I be right now?” But along with that adventure came the moment that made me laugh harder than I had in quite a while. After unloading Rick and AJ and the tools Rick would need to do an extra water-pipe repair after dinner, the girls and I drove the van part way up the mountain to the female living quarters. We were going to be last in line for our showers and we were hungry and tired and wet from a sudden rainstorm that had taken us by surprise at the work site. “Go fast!” the girls said. But as I started up the incline, we heard the big cooler of ice water slosh and tip over. I couldn’t look back, but Eve and Aubrey and Leah could. They screamed. Eve unbuckled and catapulted over the seat into the back of the van. “What?! What’s happening?” I asked, as I slowed down. “Don’t STOP!!” yelled Eve, as the wave of ice water she had been trying to hold back with her arms overtook her as I decelerated. Everything we had in the van, including Eve, was drenched. The sight of the ice and water bursting from the back of the van when I opened the doors combined with the fatigue of the day set me off into fits of laughter. It still makes me smile.


The second reason involves a little snapshot into the life of our homeowner. Debbie (name changed) worked for a Title I preschool 45 minutes from her house (in good weather,) making not quite enough money to make ends meet. Her husband, a former big rig driver, claimed to be either really lucky or really unlucky--he’d been struck by lightning three times. I’m not sure if repeated electrocution was the cause of his illness, but he is not well and needs a wheelchair along with other medical care. He can no longer work. One day Debbie came home to find her husband had fallen out of his wheelchair and had drifted in and out of consciousness on the floor all day long. She worried about leaving him alone and decided that when the school year ended, she would retire. Then her car broke down. She had to decide to fix the car or fix her house or keep leaving her husband unattended. In the winter, her uninsulated house was so cold that when she opened her kitchen cabinets, it felt like opening the freezer, but she had to fix the car and she had to retire to care for her husband. And so, she told us many times, we were the actual real-life answer to her prayers. She had been praying for months, asking God what she should do, and God sent us. 


To have someone say, “I asked for a miracle, and God sent you” and to know that (a) I was part of God’s response to one of his beloved and (b) I could have chosen not to be is a realization that really gives me pause. Over the course of seven weeks, 40-some people agreed to be the hands, feet, tape measures, saws, and hammers of God in answer to Debbie’s prayers, and I got to be one of them. It’s quite a privilege.


And I’d like to explain one more reason I keep going on ASP. ASP doesn’t just give Debbie and the other homeowners hope, it provides a much-needed booster to those of us who are really just there to supervise and empower our youth to be the answer to prayers. If you haven’t seen a teenage girl become the master of the circular saw, you’ve missed a great joy in life. Watching a group of high school students work together, cheer each other on, try out new skills and power tools, make calculations, remind each other to hydrate, hold the ladder or climb the ladder, show their peers and elders grace and a sense of humor in the presence of the inevitable but frustrating errors and ice water mishaps is a major source of hope for me. 


God doesn’t promise that you’ll never need to utter a desperate prayer, and God knows many of us did so during the last year, but the Bible does tell us stories of people whose desperate prayers were answered in unexpected ways. So if this year, more than others, made me want to do nothing, this year, more than others, I needed ASP to show me that the kids are OK, that there is still goodness and selflessness and laughter in the world. I saw it in Bell County, KY, and it came home with me and lives here too. We are the answer to each other’s prayers.



“So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.” --Galatians 6:9