Senior Esther Ashmore wrapped her arms around Neoja, a 15-year-old black girl from inner-city Detroit. For half an hour, Ashmore held the sobbing teen and didn’t say much.
At Charity Lutheran Church, where shootings are not uncommon, in the heart of Michigan’s largest city, 33 students from Hillsdale College brought reinforcements to a ministry on the front lines of pain and poverty on the weekend of Nov. 16. The mission trip was part of an overnight Christian outreach event for 25 disadvantaged youth.
Ashmore’s experience with Neoja was one of many opportunities to reach out to the hurting kids.
“I just wondered if anybody in her life cared enough to hold her, to just sit and listen,” Ashmore said. “She went to bed, and when she woke up a few hours later she gave me a huge hug and thanked me. She was so overjoyed, and that’s the power of the gospel, when people can see something is different in you without even having to say much.”
Neoja was not the only one struggling that weekend. Many of the youth came from broken homes, missing one or both parents to apathy and their siblings to violence.
“It was really important to plant a seed to show them the love of Christ because they don’t see it at home or in their peers,” sophomore Spencer Bell said. “When we broke into smaller discussion and Bible study groups, a couple of guys opened up about their addictions. I was surprised they would tell us that.”
Senior Trent Kramer led the worship team. They did classic church camp songs with hand motions along with “Amazing Grace” and a few others.
“We wanted them to have fun and to understand that God loves them,” Kramer said. “They’re so young and come from broken homes, so we wanted them to know there is a Father that loves them.”
The Hillsdale students performed the Lifehouse “Everything” skit for the youth. The skit features a young girl – Ashmore – who abandons Jesus – junior Garret Holt – for sins such as lust, alcoholism, and love of money, all represented by characters in the skit. Finally, she decides to break free and run to Jesus but is only able to when he throws back her temptations and takes their attacks on himself.
When the message and worship time were over, there was plenty of time for fun. The entire group stayed up well into the night – many did not sleep at all.
“I like seeing the reaction of the Hillsdale students to the younger kids from a foreign background,” Ashmore said. “Watching them pour out love at 3 a.m. when they want to crash is great.”
Junior David Shirey said that, when the youth first arrived, they thought that senior Steven Embry and juniors Shirey and Brett Pasche were football players for the Detroit Lions.
“There was this one kid who still said ‘I’ll whoop all y’all,’” Shirey said. “And then we played football and he actually did.”
Besides football, dancing played a big part in the night’s fun.
“This older guy came in to teach us how to dance,” Shirey said. “Needless to say, I felt the dance moves in my soul, but I couldn’t translate them in my body.”
Holt also enjoyed the dancing, but says that senior Travis Cook topped them all.
“His body was a surreal scene of ethereal movements,” Holt said.
Through the worship, message, football, and even dancing, the two groups were able to connect and build relationships that the Hillsdale group hopes will make a real difference.
“A lot of these kids were familiar with the gospel message, and it was really cool to see them talk about their vulnerability and admit to their mistakes,” junior Peter Thistleton said. “Once they did that, we were able to go about saying how we can start fixing them. We just continually turned them to Jesus.”
