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	Senior high students from St. Michael's, Mission, work on a Habitat for Humanity house during MissionPalooza.

Youth serve during summer's MissionPalooza

By Chad Senuta
Youth Missioner

Approximately 70 teens from the Dioceses of Kansas and West Missouri gathered for a week of service to those in need during the annual MissionPalooza event July 10-15.

The group stayed at St. Paul’s Church in Kansas City, Mo., and went out each day to one of more than 15 different helping agencies in the Kansas City metro area.

As the youth went out daily to feed the hungry, help build homes for homeless, care for children, and visit the sick and elderly, they were asked to reflect on the question, “Where is Jesus?” This was the theme for the 2007 event, and it comes from Matthew 25, in which Jesus tells a group of people on judgment day that what they did for others in need, they actually did for him.

Another important Scripture passage on which the teens reflected was the parable of the good Samaritan and the question “who is my neighbor?”, which prompts Jesus to tell the well-known story of an unlikely man performing a good deed.

One of the youth participants, Mary Reed of St. Andrew’s, Kansas City, Mo., gave a sermon at the closing Eucharist on the final day of the event. She described a personal experience she’d had during the week while riding public transportation to her work site. Having participants take the bus to their work assignments was a new addition to the event this year

As she and the other members of her group boarded the bus one morning, they saw they would have to stand because the bus was so crowded. An older man caught her eye and offered his seat to her. She hesitated, because in her mind he needed it more. He was older. His clothes were shabby. He looked tired.

But he kept insisting. Eventually she said yes and accepted the seat. This experience gave her a new idea of who her neighbor was. She wouldn’t have considered this man her neighbor before, but now that she had encountered him she knew this must be what Jesus had in mind.

Someone she hadn’t expected had offered kindness in a place she hadn’t expected to find it.

As so often happens when we seek to serve others, we find we are blessed in return.

The youth from both dioceses did great things for people in need in Kansas City over the five days of this event.

But all of them, like Mary, were blessed with the opportunity to see people in their community in a new way — to see their humanity and find Jesus in them.