I was a white, eighteen-year-old kid from the suburbs when I participated in my first missions experience during the summer of 1997. The North City Church of Christ was an urban city church plant, and I suppose there are still workers there, though I don’t know any of them. Even though a lot of time has passed, and a lot of things have happened in the last ten years, I doubt there has been a day since that summer that I’ve not thought about my experience in St. Louis.

I never got into trouble as a kid (except for a slew of speeding tickets), so it was a shock to see (yes, I saw it with my own eyes) 12 year old selling drugs. The first night I went out in St. Louis I saw a 12 year old kid arrested for selling drugs. I can still remember the clicking and clacking of the handcuffs as they were fastened around his wrists. It was like two tiny hammers tapping—I don’t know what on, but that tapping sound, that clicking and clacking has never left my mind. It doesn't seem like much when you see it on television but, man, is it different in real life! Drugs are different in the inner city than they are in the suburbs. I mean, I knew a lot of kids in high school who used drugs. Drugs were actually pretty common in Mustang, OK (where I went to high school), but I didn't see a lot of people who'd wasted their lives because of drugs. I know that it happened. I'm sure that they were plenty who didn't do much after high school because of drugs, but it's different in the city. In the city, drugs imprison people. In the suburbs, drugs are recreational, and while there are dangers and consequences, very few white suburbanites become imprisoned by the behavior. (I know there are some. I know that it happens. I'm just telling you the facts as I see them. Drugs might imprison a person here and there in the suburbs, but in the city they imprison entire cultures.) In north St. Louis, there was no escape from it. I didn't know any kid, and I'm talking 11 and 12 year olds, who hadn't used drugs.

That summer was also the first time I encountered poverty. I knew there were poor people in the world. I knew there were starving people in the world. I just never knew what it meant to be poor…I never knew what it meant to starve. Once I found out…I don’t know that I was emotionally equipped to handle it. I don’t think you ever become emotionally equipped to handle it. Poverty is 18 people living in a two bedroom home. There was a basement in that home; nine people stayed in the basement, but there was two inches of standing sewer water that couldn’t be drained (believe me, we tried to get rid of that problem but it just wouldn’t go away, I’ve never understood how we couldn’t fix that). Knowing poverty is different from know that poverty exists (I shudder to think what it’s like to experience it).

I’m sure I’ve forgotten about a lot of things. There good things happening in St. Louis. I remember that there were quite a few baptisms. In fact, the first person I ever baptized was a boy named Kevin. It was his 13th birthday. July 4th. How’s that for an Independence Day.

I went to college the following fall and majored in Bible because I wanted to bring the Gospel to the urban centers of America. I only lasted a year as a Bible major (I ended up with a degree in English), and by the time I graduated, I'd lost my fervor for urban ministry. I regret that. I wish I could have spent more time with the impoverished of this country. I wish I could have returned to St. Louis for at least a little while longer. I never forgot, though. Not entirely. That was a life-changing experience.

This summer, ten years after my first missions experience, I’ll be departing for Vienna, Austria to initiate a new work there. Maybe I enjoy irony more than I should (and you don’t what to know how much more than irony I enjoy sarcasm), but I find that fittingly appropriate (sermon-fittingly appropriate). At eighteen, I knew my time in St. Louis was just a summer. I knew I was going to spend the summer in St. Louis and then go to college. At 28, I stand on the brink of this new journey and I can’t see the end. Sometimes it feels like I’m floating down a river that ends with a waterfall. Sometimes it feels like I’m floating down a river that doesn’t end. Sometimes it feels both ways at once. It’s a strange sensation…and as I try to think of a good way to end this post, I can only repeat myself. It’s strange sensation.