What Do Good Neighbor Teams Do?

Written by Joy Mikhail

Whether you are new to Waypoint, or you’ve been here for some time, you have probably heard us talking about ministry to our refugee neighbors here in the Triangle. Although there are many ways to get involved, good neighbor teams are a unique way to form relationships with families and come alongside them as they are adjusting to life in America.

Currently, we have one good neighbor team made up of 8 people. I recently asked them about their experience being on a good neighbor team and how we can pray for them. Here is what they had to say:

“In this day and age there are so many ways you can choose to spend your time and oftentimes it feels like your attention is being pulled in so many different directions. One thing that is really life-giving to me about being on a good neighbor team is that this is one thing on my calendar that I know is a good choice. It makes prioritization easy. In our case, there’s a family with 5 young kids who have suddenly had to start all over in a new country that has a radically different culture from their own. They’ve had to flee because they were serving in special forces with our country to try to make their own a more safe, secure and humane place. It's such an honor to come alongside a family like this during what can otherwise be such a disorienting and lonely time. Of course, the other thing that makes serving so fulfilling is that even though this family has in many ways demonstrated Christ’s character in the honorable way that they've lived, they haven’t really had someone show the love of Christ in the name of Christ to them before and it is such an incredible privilege to step into that role with a good neighbor of friends from Waypoint.”-J. Punt

“One of the things I have loved about being part of Good Neighbor Teams is learning about different cultures. For example, hospitality is a huge part of Middle Eastern Culture. The way I am welcomed into homes is beautiful and inspiring. When I remember that this is the culture where much of the Bible takes place, those stories come even more alive. I have also learned that sometimes I want to be a savior and that is not my role. World Relief Durham and Joy Mikhail, Waypoint’s Director of Local Missions, do a great job of training teams and reminding us that it is better to help and empower refugees so that they can stand on their own. Sometimes it seems easier and quicker to do things for them, but I have learned that that takes away from their dignity and doesn’t help them in the long run. We have been part of two GNT’s now and we have learned the needs of each family can be different. The relationships formed can look different. It has been a good opportunity to practice listening and taking the time to know people as individuals instead of assuming we know what they need.”-Bethany and Stephen Clark

“Overall, it's been a blessing to watch God provide for this family in so many ways in such a short time. God's provided them with a job, a community that speaks their language, a great school, and even a car! It's been special to see how far they've come in less than a year and how quickly they've been able to put down roots here. Also, playing with their 5 kids has been THE BEST! Just because they do not speak English very well, does not mean that you can't have a fiercely competitive game of uno or hide and seek with the whole crew! Finally, they have ended up showing us a lot of hospitality which was something we didn't anticipate. They've made us awesome food (their bread has to be some of the best in the world), and it's been really cool to form a genuine friendship with a family that has such a different set of memories, experiences, and way of looking at the world.”- Amelia Punt

Please consider coming out to the World Relief Orientation Training on Saturday, October 8. (Attending does not commit you to serve on a team.) If you have any questions, please reach out (Joy@waypointrdu.com)

Lastly, we can all be a part through prayer!

· Please pray for the families being relocated. Pray for their mental and emotional needs to be met after experiencing the trauma of leaving home and family. Pray for their physical needs to be me through good steady jobs, learning English, and finding friendships and community. Pray for the kids to adjust well in school.

· Pray for more GNTs to be formed to walk alongside the families that are being resettled in the Triangle.

· Please pray for our team to have wisdom in knowing the best ways to support the family. Pray for times to connect with them and get to know them better.

· Pray that we will be filled with the Holy Spirit and walk in step with the Spirit as we love and serve this family.

· Pray that the family will see Jesus in and through us and know the hope and love that he offers.

The Study of Cities and Their People

Written by Amy Grace Watkins

I’ve experienced a lot of new things over this past year. I joined Waypoint in the winter, graduated in the spring, and got married in the summer. And most recently, I started my first fall semester as a graduate student in the field of City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill. As I am beginning to slow down at the end of this whirlwind of transitions, I’ve felt God calling me to reflect on why He led me to this graduate program and to serve people through planning and caring for their communities.

While many find the discipline of planning later in their academic career, I believe God called me to this path upon some of my first interactions with the world. As a child, I turned our family’s bonus room into a city with a combination of Legos, Playmobil, and an assortment of hand-me-down toys from my older siblings. However, I eventually “outgrew” the imaginary world of my childhood. I began to buy in to the common belief that creativity is best left to children and to the true artists of the world. And in letting go of this world of imagination, a void was left behind.

In the years of the void (that awkward time between childhood and adulthood), I became focused on one desire -- to see the world. The world that could shift my imagination to my reality; my Pinterest feed to my fingertips. So, in the wisdom of my backpack-across-Europe generation, I turned to travel. I deferred my enrollment at Carolina to take a gap year to see the Lord’s creativity beyond my North Carolina borders and to explore how other societies functioned and flourished. I thought that even if I wasn’t creative or equipped enough to influence the real world, I could experience the creativity of others. So, I made a plan. In the fall of my gap year, I would volunteer just down the road from my home in Raleigh, NC, and in the spring, I would finally get to travel and see the beautiful city of Prague in the Czech Republic. (Where if I was lucky, I might find myself, or in Christian terms, become the woman God wants me to be.)

While I was most excited about spending the spring in Prague, I was surprised that it wasn’t the cobblestone streets, the beautiful architecture, or fascinating world abroad that left the most significant impact on me. Instead, it was my time in the fall of that year interning at a place that is very near and dear to my heart, Refugee Hope Partners.

My time at Refugee Hope was an eye-opening experience, and a time where the Lord revealed more of himself, and his heart to me. It exposed the barriers that made it difficult for these families, sons and daughters of the King, to flourish. The families I encountered needed better access to jobs and essential services and more support for the difficult transition into and out of the refugee community. Refugee Hope taught me to see structures that limit opportunity and quality of life for refugee families and those on the margins, the very people Jesus pursued and sought out in his ministry. I also became aware of my privilege in a new way and learned to be more grateful for the things I had been given and the blessings and opportunities that had been set before me. I was deeply challenged and moved by my experience at Refuge Hope to seek to create systems and societies that encouraged, rather than inhibited, the flourishing of refugee and minority communities in the Triangle. Instead of finding myself in Europe, I found the Lord in others; in their love, their laughter, and their perseverance.

This gap-year experience launched my journey into Planning, reaffirming the Lord's call on my life to think deeply and creatively about how cities can be built and fashioned for all people to flourish. The grim truth about planning as a profession is that it has often been used to promote brokenness and division, behind the facade of creating an idyllic society of progress. As an undergrad at Carolina, I learned about the role of planners in racism, classism, and a clear disregard for people’s individual lives in the spirit of the “greater good.” Planners participated in the destruction and displacement of communities of color throughout America, especially in the years of highway building and suburbanization in the 1960s.

While our nation’s history is painful, the need for good, restorative planning is more evident than ever. I hope that with our history in mind, I can enter into the field of city planning to be a part of restoring and repairing these wrongs, making this earth a slightly greater preview of the Kingdom. In Jeremiah 29:7, God says to His exiled people in Babylon, “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” Just as Babylon was not the Israelites home, we are called to seek the prosperity of the nation while knowing that we are citizens of Heaven.

I feel that God called me to this field of study to be able to exercise the gifts of creativity, empathy, and story-telling in order to participate in bringing more justice and love to our communities. And since there is no one-size-fits-all planning solution, that calling will have me studying at UNC for the next two years, and my prayer is that as I learn, I will be edified and empowered to love the Triangle and love the nations through planning. Will you join me in this prayer?

Learning From Stories of Injustice and Hope

Written by Brian Grasso

I serve as the Executive Director of Simple Charity, a nonprofit that inspires Christian college students to grow in solidarity with people experiencing poverty and injustice. While doing the initial fundraising for Simple Charity’s launch, a few advisors recommended listening to the stories of people who have experienced poverty before launching out to build a nonprofit that works to alleviate poverty.

I thought this was great advice, so I reached out to twenty nonprofits to ask if we could interview one person who has benefited from their programs. With permission from these interviewees, Simple Charity published their stories in their own voices. Then, a friend suggested that these stories could make a great podcast. I recruited two Duke students to serve as hosts, and Simple Charity’s Two Coins podcast was born.

Two Coins is a podcast with highly-produced, immersive stories of people who have overcome poverty and injustice. I believe that solidarity with the poor begins with humility, with a posture of listening and learning. Here are some of the things that I have learned through the stories in Two Coins.

I have what I have because of grace, not just my own hard work.

John Njoroge grew up in rural Kenya in a household that at times was “so poor that we didn’t even have salt.” He shared his story in the Two Coins podcast about how he was taken in by a missionary family, excelled in secondary school, went to America for college, and eventually earned a PhD in philosophy. Now, Dr. John Njoroge speaks throughout the African continent on the credibility of the Christian faith.

Stories like Dr. Njoroge’s remind me that while talent is equally distributed throughout the world, opportunity is not. Successful people are prone to believe the myth that the world is generally a fair place and that those who make it to middle-class stability earned their comfortable lifestyle solely through their own hard work. But if we are going to live in solidarity with the poor like Jesus did, we have to learn to be “poor in spirit” like he taught us to be, and this means acknowledging that all that we have is a gift from the Lord.

When we listen to the stories of people who have experienced poverty and injustice, we realize that many of them work just as hard as us and simply haven’t been given the same opportunities in life. This should humble us and help us to replace a spirit of entitlement with a spirit of gratitude.

The people doing the best work to combat injustice are people who have experienced it.

Vennila Mani works at a burn victim hospital in Bangalore, India, and is one of Dr. Prema Dhanraj’s best employees. She is able to empathize with patients because she herself was a victim of a horrendous burn accident when she was a little girl. At the time, there was no facility in the city that specialized in burns, so her recovery was slow, painful, and terrifying.

Vennila’s work as a nurse at Agni Raksha hospital represents a principle about mercy work that runs throughout the stories in Two Coins: Those who have experienced an injustice are the best equipped to help others experiencing the same injustice. Consider Claire Hababu who was a victim of human trafficking and now works with Love Justice International to prevent it. She can spot the warning signs because she herself was a victim. Or consider how John Njoroge, whose story I shared earlier, now runs a children’s home that serves 31 vulnerable kids. He says, “I see myself in these kids.”

What does this principle mean for people who want to respond to injustice but haven’t experienced it themselves? We should look for nonprofits that empower people like Vennila, Claire, and John to serve their own communities and then give, pray, and serve to support them however we can. We don’t have to be the ones on the frontlines. Oftentimes, that’s not the most effective place for us anyways.

When we give to charities that empower and employ people who have experienced poverty and injustice, we are allowing community leaders to be agents of transformation.

God can heal, restore, redeem, transform, and empower all of us, regardless of what we’ve been through.

The stories in Two Coins are intense. In one episode, a woman named Kika shares the story of being the victim of a devasting conflict-related rape in a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo. After this horrifying experience, Kika was transferred to the only hospital in the region that could care for her, a missionary hospital called Heal Africa. Today, years later, Kika is a nurse at that same hospital helping poor and vulnerable children to heal from similar trauma.

She says that she wants to share her story publicly in order to give people hope that God can heal anyone. She said,

“When I underwent this, I lost any hope of being healed one day and of becoming a normal person. So, I share my story to bring back the hope for other women who underwent the same situation as me--to bring them hope to get healed one day. Because God is operating miracles for people through other people and organizations like Heal Africa. So I share my story to give hope to those women who've lost hope.”

Stories like Kika’s throughout Two Coins are reminders that God is a miracle-working God who is capable not just of healing us of our pain, but of transforming us and using us to bring healing to others.