CSM Chicago will be posting a blog series called "Interrupted: The Unexpected Movements of God Working Through CSM's Ministry". If you have a story about how God interrupted your life through a CSM trip, please email it to alumni@csm.org!
2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV): “Therefore,
if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is
here!”
The grace
of God is not simply a pardoning; it is an interruption of the human spirit
that, apart from grace, revels in its brokenness and wanders complacently in
the desert. This interruption is a tall order, and it more often than not
becomes a series of interruptions. Kim Cochran, a woman who is no stranger to
CSM and who even mentored one of our Chicago city directors, knows this
narrative all too well. This is the story of Kim’s life interrupted.
Kim Cochran
was an interim youth leader at Redeemer Church in St. Louis, Missouri. Before
the summer of 2009, she had never before been on an urban missions trip. That
particular summer, she was leading a group of youth on a trip to CSM Nashville,
and she came into the trip with all sorts of preconceived notions. She had a
fairly simplistic view of homelessness, thinking most of them to be lazy people
who were not willing to work hard enough to earn the success they longed for.
This is a stereotype that many people in our society carry around without ever
bothering to engage with someone experiencing homelessness. God’s grace was too
great to allow Kim to continue in that way of thinking. On the trip, God pushed
Kim to meet several people experiencing homelessness, and it broke her. The
people that she met defied her preconceived notions. They were not bad people,
nor were they lazy people. Most of them had simply been thrust with little
control into circumstances that were extremely difficult to escape and that
caused them to be stuck in the world of poverty and homelessness. Kim came from
that trip filled with compassion rather than the judgment she had carried
before.
During the
following summer, Kim took a group of youth to CSM Chicago. It was on this trip
that Kim began to see people in a new light. She stopped defining them by their
lack of home or money, and she began to see them as mothers, fathers, brothers,
and sisters who happened to be experiencing homelessness or poverty and who
were also subsisting in extremely rough, oftentimes dangerous, conditions. The
conditions she saw in Chicago left an impact on her heart, as she served both
in homeless shelters significantly lacking in material resources and in
neighborhoods that were devastated by gang violence. In one neighborhood, the
children could not even play outside because it was too dangerous. It dawned on
her that each person she was interacting with was someone with a rich, complex,
and beautiful story much like hers, and that each one of these stories was so
much bigger than homelessness, gang violence, poverty, etc. Faces, stories,
personalities, gifts, and everything else that is central to being human were
matched with the statistics she had heard; she thought of these humans who were
newly significant to her trying to make it in some of the worst conditions that
she had seen, and she was struck with the weight of it all. Just a little over
a year prior, she would have thought of many of the people she was meeting as
lazy, “mooching off the system”, maybe even as criminals. Now, her response was
a heart filling to the brim with love and compassion.
Kim’s
process did not end there. A year later, she took her youth to CSM in Washington,D.C., where, as Kim puts it, God started to “put it all together.” She had
spent so much of her time on these trips coming in with a savior complex,
thinking that, because of her more well-off socioeconomic background, she had
the upper hand and was better off than those she was serving in almost every
way. In D.C., God impressed on Kim the idea that the people she was serving had
dignity, just like she did. They were not helpless human beings, and they had
things to offer. More than that, they
could minster to her. Kim’s group led
a Vacation Bible School in the housing projects in D.C., and Kim got to know
some of the families of the children that week. One of the mothers made a
particularly big impact on Kim. As Kim listened to her talk, she was floored by
the love this woman had for her children, how she was raising them, all the
sacrifices she was making and things she was doing for them to ensure that they
had the best life possible, and how deep and strong her faith was. Kim had not
expected that on this trip she would be taught and ministered to by the people
she came to serve, and she was deeply humbled and moved. She had subconsciously
and errantly assumed, like even the most well-intentioned of us do, that
because she came from more she could not glean and benefit from the wisdom of
those who came from less. God did not simply interrupt this expectation; he
shattered it.
This past
spring, Kim went on a youth missions trip to Guatemala, ministering to people
who literally lived in mud huts. She thought of how this made the poverty she
saw in the inner city look like lavish riches, and she thought to herself,
“These people are living in the lowest depths of poverty and do not have access
to the gospel. Why are we wasting our time in the inner cities of America?”
True to form, God used Kim’s daughter to humble her by pointing out that material poverty did not equal spiritual
poverty. Among some of the most destitute poverty on the planet, Kim saw depths
of faith that she had not before witnessed and that she did not even feel she
possessed. She realized that meeting physical needs was important, but the
physical can often be a distraction from the gospel of Christ. As Kim’s
daughter said, “God’s economy is different than ours.”
Kim has
taken in all that God has had her experience and is now externalizing it to
others. Back in Missouri, she volunteers at a camp for underprivileged
children, many of whom are from Ferguson. Kim has developed relationships with
a few of the mothers of the children she serves. She sees the way they are
raising their children well in the midst of poverty, gang violence, and next to
impossible situations, and she affirms them and lifts them up in that, speaking
dignity over them. Kim has come to firmly believe that, though these problems
of physical poverty need to be solved, the gospel has to be the most important
thing. The biggest problems these mothers have, more than providing for their
children or keeping them safe even, are how to raise their kids to love Jesus
in the midst of the darkness. Though humans come from all sorts of different
socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, we are all united by our need for Jesus
and His gospel, and this is the gospel Kim feels called to live out and speak
over the people in her own community. Where she used to be sternly opposed to
venturing into crime-ridden St. Louis neighborhoods, God has now convicted her
to fearlessly join in with the others who are brandishing the light of His
gospel and Spirit in areas of brokenness and darkness. This coming summer, she
will be returning to CSM Chicago with a church called The Summit, and God will more
than likely continue to interrupt her. It is almost humorous; precisely when,
in our proud state, we think we have arrived, God turns our worlds upside-down
and shows us how much more of our journey is left. If we are paying attention,
we will see that, in the midst of us constantly speaking our own plans, views,
and assumptions over the world, God is always
trying to interrupt us and speak louder than us for our own good.
Ask yourself, “How is God trying to interrupt my life? Will I let Him?”
Ask yourself, “How is God trying to interrupt my life? Will I let Him?”