February 4thA Menno Minute - Kienna Krahn
Community, Hope and Jesus
Throughout my life, I have seen Jesus in many different ways, with hope being the most common. I attended Rosthern Junior College (RJC) from 2022-2024, which taught me a lot of lessons and brought me close to faith in general. One of these ways was during the school year, where we would have a week called Alternative Learning and Service Opportunities (ALSO), in which we would go somewhere and volunteer and learn about the area that we were in. In grade 12, I got to go volunteer with Appalachia Build in Elkhorn City, Kentucky. This area is one of the lowest-income areas in the USA, and residents struggle to afford necessary home renovations. One day, I was working with a group to do some upkeep and add concrete ramps around the church where we were staying. The lady from Appalachia Build told us that this church is a central part of the community and that many people see this building as a symbol of hope for their situations. This really got me to think about how I see hope, and if I could find a symbol in my own life that I could associate hope and Jesus with, and to nobody’s surprise, the symbol I decided on was Camp Valaqua. It is a place, like the church in Elkhorn city, that brings community together, and I have always found that community is something that truly brings me hope and closer to Jesus.
During my grade 12 year, I had another more personal encounter with hope and a lesson in finding a new community. My parents were having some health problems, and I couldn’t be there like I wanted to because I was in Saskatchewan. I was really upset, and I didn’t have my usual support systems as I would have at home, and of course, in my head, I could only have one support system that could give me hope. So I would often call my parents and beg to come home, and every time my dad would respond by saying I should look among my peers and use the community around me to give me hope. Now, I never really considered actually using my new community for support and hope, especially because they weren’t my friends from home, and I felt like they didn’t fully understand the situation, but I immersed myself in the community, and I found it so much easier to find hope once I did so. The community RJC fostered is so real, and it made it easy for me to find similarities between it and camp, which I never would have considered similar at all. Community is a beautiful thing, and it can be an amazing beacon that shows people the hope that Jesus shines. When people can find a physical thing they can associate with hope, that connection becomes so much stronger.
Photo L - R: Kienna, Darrel Krahn, Lynn Arbic
(Credit: Kienna Krahn)