When Sarah opens the door to the apartment, the heat greets me before the students did. Two-year-old Emma, my staff partner’s daughter, wears a bathing suit, chosen only because it allowed her to sweat more than a t-shirt, and reclines in a chair, unusually slowed by the weight of tem-perature. Three Asian-American students crowd around a kitchen the size of my bathroom, chop-ping avocadoes and arguing over the best way to fry enchiladas. Another student takes a cold shower after cleaning up a vomiting toilet, while the fifth stands awkwardly, watching.

Five Northwestern students sensed God’s calling to spend eight summer weeks in Lawndale, one of the poorer, primarily African-American neighborhoods in inner-city Chicago, on InterVarsity’s Chicago Urban Program. During the weekdays, they serve as co-teachers (in partnership with Lawndale-native college kids) at a church-run summer school to help Lawndale kids get ahead. In the evenings, they learn about issues of justice and racial reconciliation from a Christian per-spective. “We weren’t really close in the beginning,” Jenny confesses to me, just out of earshot of the group. “We’re very different. None of us would have hung out on campus.” Yet here they are, living in close community in an apartment in Lawndale for eight weeks, with restricted email and cell phone access, and a stipend for groceries that forces them to shop with each other’s in-terests in mind.

In my dinner visits throughout the summer, I learn more about the team. Rob, a twenty-year-old Chinese-American about to enter medical school, loses his appetite when he cooks, so he just watches us eat his creations and tells us about his family. Sarah, the lone white Greek I-V student on the team, struggles with her co-teacher’s approach to curriculum development as they teach fifth-graders together. Joe just graduated from NU and asks mostly for prayer for his own ability to focus on a disciplined., vibrant relationship with God. Emily, who just finished her freshmen year, expresses her despair and outrage at the seemingly impossible nature of helping her stu-dents reach reading levels appropriate to their age. “The system is failing them. And I feel like we’re failing them. We’re not doing enough while we’re here.” Jenny agrees heartily, wishing more of her kindergarteners had time with the reading specialist. She also wonders why her co-teacher doesn’t seem to like her.

I share about my own journey in our multiethnic neighborhood, how it’s easy to make assump-tions about people of another culture and how much it’s helped me to actively build relationships instead of judging. We talk about ways they can help kids this summer and how they can use their future career and lifestyle choices to help the poor. By my next visit, Sarah tells me that she and her co-teacher have become allies in the classroom. “He stood up for me to the kids,” she shares proudly. Rob and Emily ask me to pray for them to know God’s calling on their lives. “What if God is calling us to live in a place like Lawndale? Can you still follow God and be comfortable?”

It hasn’t been an easy summer for the students. They’ve wrestled with issues of race, money, food, conflict, authenticity, and justice. The Chicago Urban Program staff team have ministered to the students and run the program daily, while three of us NU staff have visited them in Lawndale throughout the summer, to help them process the experience now and when they return to cam-pus. We’ve prayed hard for breakthroughs for the students in the times when they’ve seemed stuck, maybe in the same ways that Jesus prayed for his disciples before he left. I’m encouraged to see God growing them in visible and invisible ways, each time I visit. Last I heard, Rob finally connected with the Lawndale Medical Clinic (run by the church we partner with), after begging any LMC doctors he ran into on the street, to give him a tour, and found his home. Sarah asked me on our last visit, “How can we talk more about social justice at Greek I-V this fall?”

Our hope is that these students encounter God in powerful ways that last a lifetime, both in per-sonal discipleship, in their ability to engage in Christian community, and in understanding God’s heart for justice for all people. Please pray with me that God impacts each one in these last days of the program, as well as in their reentry weeks to come.

 Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/senor_codo/

The Greek IV story was shared by Emery Silva Author Website: http://nugreekiv.wordpress.com Author Email: Contact Author Author Bio: Emery is a campus staff with Greek InterVarsity at Northwestern University. More Stories by Emery Silva

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This post is tagged Chicago, Social Justice, Urban Projects