Testimony: Stephanie Berkas; Sunday, December 6, 2015

Good morning. My name is Stephanie Berkas and I’ve been attending St. Luke’s now for a little over two years. I entered this community in August of 2013, when I served as one of St. Luke’s Ministry in Context seminary students and then kept coming, having found a community that gives me hope in what sometimes feels like darkness.Some of you also know that I served as a young adult missionary in South Africa through the ELCA a number of years ago now, through a program called Young Adults in Global Mission. And I now work for that program, helping to send young adults into service alongside our Lutheran companions all over the world.I promise that I’ve lived lots of full and beautiful and difficult life since 2010, when I returned from South Africa, but something about the season of Advent always pulls me back to the complexities and vulnerabilities of those first few months at Grassy Park Lutheran Parish, just outside of Cape Town, South Africa. I lived with a local Lutheran pastor and his family, and I served alongside a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa.I speak nostalgically about my time in South Africa and about the amazing transformation that occurred in and around me during that year, but transformation almost never comes without challenge. When the YAGM program is at its best, it unsettles the young adults who serve. In your year of international service, you learn about yourself and your context, sure, but you also unlearn every notion and worldview that you held to be true. For me, it shook up all of my notions of self and place in the world.The first few months of service for me were unexpectedly really hard. I was a twelve hour bus ride from the nearest volunteer, and a full twenty four hours away from my coordinators. With the exception of one short trip, I had never been out of the United States. I lived with a host family and served at the local congregation and elementary school, but I was really lonely and, frankly, terrified to be away from home and from all the comforts and familiarity that I knew. For a number of reasons – an initial illness, fear, loneliness, and privilege – I crumbled under the expectations I had had for this year. This wasn’t the romantic, cross-cultural experiences that I had imagined. I was lonely. I was a stranger in a new place. I was hungry for comforts. I was lost amidst a new language. My deeply set cultural values strained and rubbed and corroded within a cultural context that was so, so different. I would come to be challenged by the political, historical, and cultural realities of South Africa, but first, I had to deal with myself.I swirled into a pattern of anxiety. Because I had gotten ill from something I ate, I stopped eating. And because I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping, and because I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t thinking clearly. For a period of time, my anxiety got the best of me, and I honestly wondered if God had abandoned me in South Africa; that maybe I had fabricated this call to come across the world. I’ve maybe never been more terrified than the moment I sat, for the first time in my life, convinced that God wasn’t with me.I remember one of the very first Sundays that I worshipped at Grassy Park Lutheran Parish. The entire church service was in Afrikaans and I had no idea what was happening around me. I was exhausted, mostly because of this swirling darkness of anxiety that had gripped me in these first few weeks, and I was trying – trying – to catch any of the Afrikaans being spoken around me.  There I was, sitting in my pew, stumbling through a completely foreign worship book, and feeling totally overwhelmed. “What am I doing here?” When I gave up trying to follow along and sank into my pew, I began hearing the word ee-yer-ah over and over again throughout the service. Ee-yer-ah, ee-yer-ah, ee-yer-ah. When I finally had the courage to ask the person next to me what it meant, I was told that ee-yer-ah was the word for Lord. I was feeling pretty good that, sure enough, my ear had picked up a word (and a pretty important word)! And when I looked down at my hymnal in my hand, I saw that the word ee-yer-ah, Lord, was written in Afrikaans h-e-r-e. ... And there I was, sitting 9,000 miles away from home, churning with anxiety, worshipping in a foreign language, and God’s very name was illuminated as “here.” God was with me. A crack of light in a time of darkness.About a week later, that illumination widened through God’s very face showing up in Margot. Margot was a member of the Lutheran Parish and had invited me to serve at the elementary school where she worked as principal. Unbeknownst to me, Margot was a recent empty-nester and looking for someone to nurture. She had silently (and very motherly) noticed that I hadn’t been eating well; that I had gotten quiet and sad, and she was worried. She asked me if I would accompany her to the local market because she needed to get groceries for the teacher’s training that was to happen after school that day. As her volunteer, I obliged, and she walked me through every aisle of the store. In between her selections, she asked me what food I liked to eat and I casually pointed out this and that; the familiar. We bought the groceries and left the store. Curiously, but not altogether surprising, the teacher’s training event didn’t happen that afternoon. But the next day, when I arrived at school, I found that the staff fridge was stocked full of all of all the foods I had pointed out to her the day before... the fridge that I had access to and from which I was welcomed to eat... and that fridge remained stocked that way for the rest of the year. Margot literally fed me in a time of need and fear. God showed up in her over and over again, illuminating my way forward in a new and unfamiliar place.And so, when these Advent nights grow longer and the days shorter, I’m reminded of some of the most vivid acts of lightness that I’ve received in my life. I’m reminded that we worship a God that shows up in the mundane and the ordinary; a God who shows up in a hymn book on our lap or an invitation to a meal or any of the other daily acts around which we live. A God for whom we wait; who enters this world in the most meager way imaginable, and illuminates our path.