Colleen Brinkmeier: "Only God Brought Me Through"
Around 7:30 a.m., inside a brick house on the corner of Kimbark and Kenwood Avenues on the far South Side of Chicago, Colleen Brinkmeier gathers at a table with Debra on a recent Tuesday, just as they do every morning.
They pull out their Bibles, and each has brought with them a devotional, from which they’ll share a passage with one another.
A block away, 87th Street bustles with a Cash 4 Gold store, a seafood shop and a deli. Several blocks west of the house in this city of neighborhoods lies Chatham and several blocks east stands South Chicago. Both Chatham and South Chicago have reputations as two of the more notorious areas of Chicago’s South Side.
But here in Marynook, a tiny hamlet nestled within the Avalon Park community, there are houses like this modest brick one-story home, most of them built in the post-World War II-era. The streets stay quiet and tranquil.
This, after the tumult of Colleen’s life before a four-year stay in prison, is exactly what she wants right now. This is Bridge to Freedom.
The house on Kenwood contrasts the old Bridge to Freedom apartment in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood on the West Side, which records the most violence per capita in the whole city. In the organization’s apartment there, on Central Avenue, noise prevailed at all hours. A bullet once flew in and lodged itself in the bathroom wall while Colleen was home. The police said they preferred to leave the bullet in the wall.
Bridge to Freedom, founded by Mica Garrett, a Navigator who was herself twice incarcerated, functions exactly as the name sounds: It’s a link for the formerly incarcerated between prison and total freedom. It’s not a halfway house, though. It’s completely voluntary; applicants go through a process to get accepted and agree to an all-encompassing faith component that includes morning devotions and weekly church attendance.
The first floor of the Marynook home contains three bedrooms and two bathrooms for the women in the program, and the basement level is laid out the same way for the men. A tone of respect laces through everyone’s language as they address each other: Ms. Mica, Ms. Debra, Ms. Colleen, Mr. James, Ms. Julie, Mr. Henry, Mr. Peter.
Born in 1962, Colleen grew up on a large farm in a small town called Fairdale in rural Illinois, about 90 minutes outside of downtown Chicago. Her closest neighbors lived a half-mile to a mile away.
“We had all the animals,” she says. “I knew how to do it all.”
The fourth of five kids, Colleen and her family raised beef cows, dairy cows, pigs, and chickens. They plowed. They grew corn and peas and wheat.
But in 1999, the jail and prison sentences for Colleen began. They started out short, in connection to things like stealing and petty theft.
She talks about being stuck in a rough, two decades-long relationship with the father of her two sons. They lived in Rockford, about 90 miles outside of Chicago. In the beginning of the relationship, she says he grew verbally and emotionally abusive. Toward the end, the abuse got physical.
In the middle of their time together, Colleen says she got caught stealing something for her boys, Joey, now 26, and BJ, now 31, and served a six-month jail sentence. Later in her relationship with her kids’ father, Colleen suffered a miscarriage so severe she needed a total hysterectomy.
During her stay at the hospital, Colleen says, her ex-boyfriend “literally moved me out of the house.” He found her an apartment, paid one month’s rent and left her and the boys on their own.
It didn’t turn out well. In the next several years, Colleen was caught committing public aid fraud and spent three more stints in jail. Things got really bad around a decade ago, when, she says, “I got caught up with the wrong people.”
The group in Rockford would steal checks and cavort around suburban Chicago, visiting big box stores like Walmart, K-Mart, and Home Depot, writing stolen checks for merchandise and re-selling the goods.
In September 2009, she told the group she would write one final check for one more batch of stolen Walmart merchandise, and there would be no more.
“I just had that feeling,” she says. “I was done with the group.”
And yet. Five months later, she got a call from her ex, saying the police had shown up looking for her. It turns out the check she wrote at Walmart was stolen from a judge’s wife; police had caught Colleen forging the stolen check on video surveillance.
Colleen got scared. She ran. She left Rockford, heading to Springfield for five months and staying with a friend. Another friend convinced her to head to Las Vegas, but to do so, she had to go back through Rockford. She booked a bus ticket that took her through Rockford, texted her best friend she was heading over, and she says when she showed up at the bus station, “police were everywhere you could imagine.”
She was sent to Logan Correctional Center for a year, and then spent three and a half years at Decatur Correctional Center. At the same time, her two sons had received a prison sentence for arson. Her whole family was incarcerated at once.
Her inmate number—R36357—followed Colleen around from prison to prison.
At the time, Colleen says, “I was still rebellious. I was still mad.”
Life at Decatur, she says, felt so hard. For health reasons—a hernia and respiratory issues—she couldn’t perform a job. She received $14.70 a month. She heard from her sons over the phone every couple of weeks. Sometimes, they wrote her letters. Some women in the prison treated her with kindness, every so often offering her an extra bag of noodles.
One day, a few weeks after arriving at Logan, she read in the newspaper that a 67-year-old man had been killed in a home invasion. Later that day, she got a call from the jail staff asking her how to reach Jim, the man she had been dating at the time. She realized the murdered man had been Jim.
She was shocked. She immediately went into grieving, helped by a counselor at the prison.
“Some say it was a blessing that I was incarcerated [at the time of the home invasion] because who knows what would have happened if I would have been there, too,” she says.
Jim’s death also ruled out one of Colleen’s options for where to go after she finished serving her sentence.
As she processed his death, figuring out how to occupy her time in prison took the largest toll on Colleen.
She attended a church service every other Saturday. She joined a few Bible studies. She signed up for Bible classes in the mail. And in those long stretches during the day, she got curious about the Bible itself.
She would take a Bible into the day room of the prison for three to four hours at a time. Colleen had a system: Write down the first verse of a book of the Bible. Flip to the last chapter of the book. Write down the first verse of the last chapter in the book. For single-chapter books like I John, Jude, and Philemon, she devised a different method of writing verses. She wrote down verses for every single book, even obscure ones in Nahum and Numbers.
When she finished, she would start with the first verse of the second chapter of a Bible book. A prison guard there who also served as a chaplain challenged Colleen to memorize Romans 8:28, his favorite verse: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (NIV).
So she wrote it down, and when they saw each other, she recited it.
In November 2014, at a semi-annual re-entry summit at Decatur, Colleen met Mica, the Bridge to Freedom founder, and Debra, who served as the program director for Bridge to Freedom for the last seven years and also lived with the women in the house.
A friend Colleen had met in prison, plus the prison counselor, pushed her toward them, reminding Colleen she’d be on the outside in three months with no place to go. Nearly everyone else told her not to go to Bridge to Freedom.
“You don’t want to go there,” she says they told her. “It’s a cult.”
Before they left for the day, Mica handed Colleen an application and asked her to fill it out.
“You’re coming to our place,” Mica told Colleen.
Colleen says her prison unit wasn’t happy about it, but she felt relief she had a place to go and wouldn’t be back in Rockford.
Then, in February 2015, for the first time in years, she changed out of her prison-issue blue pants and long-sleeved white shirt. For the first time in her life, she took a train, a Metra from Decatur to Union Station in Chicago, where Debra met her. She would become the first female graduate of Bridge to Freedom.
She looks back at her life then and now realizes how hard she made things for Debra and Mica.
“When I first came, I was a mess,” she says. “I took them through stages where they didn’t know what to do.”
She and Mica visited a doctor on the West Side who diagnosed Colleen with depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder. At one point, says Mica, who went with Colleen to all of her psychiatric appointments, Colleen’s doctor said she would need to be institutionalized.
“He said she was too far gone,” Mica says. “If he could see her now…”
Every Sunday, when they’d go to church, Colleen would dress in short skirts and shirts showing off her cleavage.
“They were too short for the place where we were going,” says Debra, “and I would catch her at the door and say, ‘No ma’am. You can’t wear that. We got to bring it down. Bring it down.’”
Three years later, everything has changed. Colleen sits on a couch at the Bridge to Freedom house’s living room dressed in a lavender blouse flattering for her shape.
“Now, she dresses very fashionable,” Debra says. “It’s beautiful.”
Her blonde hair falls around her shoulders, and her bangs have been neatly trimmed. She’s had a pedicure and her fingernails painted, indulgences she makes sure to enjoy regularly.
Of course, the changes go far beyond her appearance.
In spring 2015, Colleen had been riding to a picnic when she got sick. Really sick.
The driver had to stop and open the van door so she could throw up.
Doctors later told her she had been having a heart attack.
Several months later, in December 2015, she underwent a triple bypass heart surgery. Three months later, she was still at Rush University Medical Center, recovering. When she tried to go home once, she got an infection in her legs.
At one point, she medicated herself on prescription pain pills. It just hurt too much.
“I was in so much pain,” Colleen says. “Nothing was working. I was in so much pain, I even asked God to take my life.”
She watched television. She slept—a lot. She kept taking prescription pills.
“I didn’t really care,” she says. Then, “I went to Ms. Deb, and I said, ‘I need help. You need to take this medicine.’ Because it was taking over.”
God used those months, her darkest, weakest, most pain-filled moments, to draw Colleen close to Him.
“It was only God that brought me through,” she says. “Life just shined totally different. I needed to let the past be the past, and not take any more steps to go back into the past.”
Later that summer, Colleen got baptized at her church, Apostolic Faith Church in Indiana.
She’s still growing, still having morning devotions. On a recent morning, one study centered on exalting and praising God and another on doing small things with great love.
Bridge to Freedom funds itself in part by cooking and catering events, and Colleen helps cook for those. She also makes mac and cheese and scalloped potatoes and ham for her housemates on occasion.
On a couple of weekdays this January, Colleen headed with Debra, Mica, and Ella, who joined the house in December, to North Park University on the city’s North Side, dishing out the rolls, chicken, and lasagna they had prepared for a conference on Christianity and mysticism.
Like her, Colleen’s two boys are out of prison now, and she sometimes visits them in Rockford. Her dynamic with them, now that they’re both out and no longer on parole, remains a bit stilted.
“I’m still figuring out where I fit in,” she says.
In Bridge to Freedom, her role is clear: family. She considers Julie Beland, her roommate and former prison-mate—they served as peer educators at Decatur together, discussing health and hygiene with other inmates—her sister.
Colleen and Julie will stay up late, sometimes ‘til 1 a.m., just talking.
“She’s a wonderful person,” Julie says. “She’s my heart. She’s my best friend.”
Colleen has been at Bridge to Freedom for three years now. She graduated from the program last year, and she envisions someday renting or owning her own place or staying to serve others who come through Bridge to Freedom.
Colleen had looked at Debra like an older sister, gentle, wise and in many senses, her navigator.
And then, when Debra left Bridge to Freedom in February, Colleen started leading the morning devotions.
“Colleen has probably grown more than anyone at Bridge to Freedom,” Mica says. “She’s grown the most—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.”
When Colleen first came to Bridge to Freedom, according to Mica, she couldn’t write a complete sentence. Then, Sierra Neuharth, the daughter of Jay Neuharth, the director of The Navigators in Chicago, began tutoring Colleen, and now she’s writing papers and studying for a bachelor’s degree.
Colleen, now 55 years old, has a dream for the rest of her life: She wants to become a prison counselor. When she and Julie left Decatur, they said there was one counselor for every 400 inmates.
Colleen wants to help right-size that overwhelming ratio, and she’s taking classes so she can go back to prisons like Decatur to counsel the women there. She has a couple of more years of her schooling left, but can already visualize her return through the barbed wire.
“When we go into prison, you’re always going through the back door,” Colleen says. “I don’t ever want to do that again. I want to be proud to walk through a front door and say I’m walking out that same door I came in on that same day.”
Erin Chan Ding is a freelance journalist with The Navigators in Chicago.
James Kang: A Heart for Asia
James Kang moves through Southeast Asia with alacrity and aplomb, wearing flip flops and weaving through the streets without fear, stepping in front of the ever-present motorbikes weaving past him—often hopping on one himself—and greeting longtime friends in just about every country.
James had grown a silver-flecked, ebony mustache for the first time just before a recent trip, and it delighted both friends and strangers. One man who worked for Air Asia, unknown to James, even stopped him at an airport to ask him to pose for a promotional photo.
“This never happened before I grew this mustache,” says James, his dark eyes dancing behind his glasses in a way that makes you think it actually did.
He looks much younger than his 60 years, and even more so in Southeast Asia, where his friend and fellow Chicago Navigator Mica Garrett, who accompanied him on a recent trip observes, “He seems more free here.”
Indeed, a large part of James’s heart resides in Southeast Asia. Born in Korea, James began working in the Philippines in 1987, leading short-term teams, and he hasn’t stopped traveling to various countries in the region since. James, who is on the leadership team for The Navigators in Chicago and former director of The Navigators Asian American Network, is also working to form a kind of sister partnership between Navigators in Chicago and one of the Southeast Asian countries where The Navigators serve (unnamed here to protect the sensitive nature of the work).
James talked about his life on a recent Sunday afternoon on the 23rd floor of the Eastin Hotel Makkasan in Bangkok, the city splayed out before him with its honking tuk-tuks, or motorcycle carts, and a plate of hummus and soft naan bread spread out before him. It was a bit of a respite during a vision trip he had taken with Mica and others from Bridge to Freedom, the Chicago re-entry program Mica founded for the formerly incarcerated. Seated on an outdoor balcony, James dives into his 30-year history with The Navigators, his hopes for the Southeast Asian region, and his sense of Asian American identity and the linkages inherent in it.
What centers you in your ministry?
Two passages drive me in my ministry in Chicago. One is Philippians 2, where the apostle Paul says that you should consider others as more important than yourself. The other is 1 Corinthians 6 and also in 12, where God has given different gifts to different members of the body for the benefit of the body, and not for individual benefit, but how it benefits every one of us.
When Jesus talked about sin and idolatry and all those things, it’s defined and motivated by self, where Jesus’ ministry was all motivated by His relationship with the Father. I spent about a year just reading the Gospels over and over again, and Jesus always talks about “not by me,” but “by the Father.” Everything was dependent on the Father, and His sense of self was almost nonexistent. I love that. I think, hopefully, this is where I can get to, and the way I do ministry is like that.
So there’s a tension I experience when I’m in the States—you have to have a strong sense of self and identity so that you can really give and minister outside of yourself and really love and serve in humility. Also, when I come to Asia, I hear, it’s not about self, but it’s about others. It’s about really considering the family, the extended family and other people around you. In Asia, they would say, my identity is based on what other people think of me or how they interact with me. In America, my identity is based on my responsibility or my accomplishments.
So in Asia their sense of self is really weak. At one of the classes I teach in Southeast Asia on international interviewing skills, I say, “Tell me about yourself.” They say, “I’m in school because my mom and dad sacrificed.” It’s all about other people. I say, “But tell me about you.” They say, “Well, that’s too selfish. Why would I want to do that?” It’s a very different context here. What I’m trying to do is really balance the differences. It’s really both our individual self and yet at the same time, I am really nonexistent without others because I am a part of the family, and I’m an important part of the Kingdom. That’s what drives me.”
What was your childhood like?
I was born in Korea and came to the States when I was 9, and lived in North Carolina, in Charlotte. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) wanted my dad to practice English and writing more. So they sent us to a PCA-affiliated university in Charlotte, which is called Johnson C. Smith University. It’s an all-black university, so HBCU [Historically Black College and University]. So when we went there our housing was all black. The church and the school I went to was all white. So that was my first experience with the cultural dynamic differences. That’s why in ministry, 14 years later, I was drawn to ministry with African Americans. I was a volunteer chaplain at Cook County maximum security with Mica [Garrett], the Salvation Army halfway house, places like that. Because I really connected with the African Americans when I was growing up [in North Carolina].
Both my parents have master’s degrees, but I was really yearning for my own identity growing up, so I read a lot of books by Karl Marx. That was before I was a Christian. There was a book [by Robert Pirsig] on Zen and motorcycle maintenance, about yourself. I was really searching. So I quit school and because I was reading Karl Marx, and it was about working with your hands, I went to become a mechanic. I went to the University of Illinois at Chicago, and after one year, I quit. I worked two years as a car mechanic. The guy fired me because I wasn’t good at it. The only thing he let me do was oil changes. I then went to Loyola for school because my high school grades [at Gordon Tech, then an all-boys Catholic High School on the North Side of Chicago] were pretty good.
How did you become a Christian?
I came to Christ through my sister when I was 24. My sister, Ruth, and a few other people started the Asian American Christian Ministries at Northwestern University. She told me about a retreat, and I went to the retreat, and I came to Christ. I was at Loyola. This was 1982. That’s how I came to Christ, and got involved with Navigators at Northwestern for two years. I lived in an apartment on Foster Avenue by campus there.
How did you join The Navigators?
I got involved with The Navigators at Northwestern from ’82 to ’84, and then I went to Dallas Theological Seminary from ’84 to ’88. While I was in Dallas, I met my wife, Janet, in Oklahoma—my roommate was dating her roommate up in Oklahoma City.
While I was in Dallas, I joined Navigators staff and did my internship at Long Beach State. I wanted to do church planting out there in Southern California. It was the late ‘80s, and it was a lot of transition with a lot of new immigrants coming in. A lot of young people are having Asian American identities for the first time. It was a unique time.
I got connected with Navigators staff there, and they said, “Hey, why don’t you consider joining staff, and doing this here.” For Asians, it’s hard, you know, because we have to raise support. Initially, my parents were opposed to me raising support, but now they’re fully supportive.
What are your roles with The Navigators?
I wear three hats with The Navigators. There’s a smaller hat within the main hat. The first hat is I’m on the Chicago Navigators leadership team. The staff team is divided into three spheres, and I oversee sphere three, which includes Nations Within, Navigators Missions, and International Student Ministries. Other than that, [Chicago Director] Jay Neuharth gives me responsibilities like communications and the staff retreat.
The second hat I’m wearing is as a staff member of the Navigators Missions ministry. I’m on the national leadership team. I’m the director of the ethnic implementation team, and our role is to influence Navigators Missions staff-wide so we can recruit ethnic staff to go overseas. We have more than 300 staff with Missions. We don’t have a lot of ethnics on our Missions team, just a handful.
Under Navigators Missions, I also coach short-term team leaders who are going to Southeast Asia. This summer, I’ll be coaching three teams with seven team leaders. So I help with the logistics of connecting with local staff. Communicating with leaders here can be quite complicated. There’s so much cultural dissonance and misunderstanding. What people hear is not what they’re really communicating.
The third hat that I have is utilizing my connections, relationship spheres, to pioneer more summer and short-term, mid-term, and long-term missionaries to be in Southeast Asia.
What draws you to ministry in Southeast Asia?
Why not East Asia? Why not Korea, Japan, or China? Why Southeast Asia? I don’t know. I’m realizing, everyone, we’re all broken. We have broken pieces, all of us. We’re a mosaic of broken pieces, that’s who we are. In American evangelicalism, the thing that I hear all the time is, “God saved you from your brokenness, now move on, fulfill whatever God calls you to do.” So there’s a huge avoidance of our brokenness. If it becomes sharp, we blame others. There’s this whole sense of having my act together in America, moving along. God is powerful. God loves you. You know, go and do great things for Him.
The emphasis is not on how my brokenness can be healed and influenced by others but on my own. It’s about, “You’re great. God loves you.” I’m not panning Christianity [in America]. But here, in Southeast Asia, I’m realizing among Christians, as well, they accept their brokenness, they’re not ashamed of it. As shattered and as broken as they are, they really embrace it and allow God to use that to impact the lives of other people. So it’s less about them and more about others. And that’s what I love about being here.
When did you first get involved in Southeast Asia?
I started by traveling on a team in ’87 to the Philippines and came back in ’88. I brought students in ’92, ’94, and ’98 is when we started doing it every year. My wife was a huge, huge partner in this. Now that our son, Elliott, is grown, it’s easier, but back then, it wasn’t. Back then, I used to be gone four to six weeks because I was actually leading the summer teams, not coaching team leaders.
The generations are so different between then and now. When I first started doing this every year, students were born in ’78. Now they’re born in ’99, 2000. That’s a huge generational difference. One of the things I really want to do is, I want them to see how God works differently from where they’re from, how God works differently among other people and cultures and how other cultures and people are all equally loved by God. Because you could take the American culture or Christianity and try to impose that on them. But we need to see other people on equal footing as ourselves. Don’t see someone as lower than us—love people equally.
What keeps you coming back to the region?
I was talking to a Navigator here in Southeast Asia, and he said, “Well, all Navigator staff, we consider ourselves a family. But in America we have Navigator relationships, family, business, co-workers, then we have immediate family, and then we have close people we have fellowship with. Everything is compartmentalized.”
But here it isn’t. I love that. It’s not based on the benefit I get from you. Here there isn’t a clear line between working relationships and other relationships. Like, where does the line between co-workers and just caring for one another begin and end? One of the key staff in Southeast Asia and her husband, they called me in the middle of the night, “Are you okay? We heard you had a cough.” And they would drive on their scooter late at night to bring something for me if I am sick. It’s that kind of caring that’s different.
How does being Asian American shape your ministry?
Asian American identity is quite complex because in America, you have a spectrum of Asians who just came from overseas to those who have five, six family generations of Asian Americans.
Asians are very group oriented. From our family, we get pressure to be part of the collective, “What would other people think?” That’s how I was raised. For a lot of Americans, it was, “What do you care what other people think?” So it’s that cultural tension, and a lot of Asians we’re somewhere one foot in American culture, where we value America, we love America, we want to assimilate but there’s part of our value system that’s very group-oriented, which is reflected in why some people think Asians are not vocal or they’re passive, or they’re not strong leaders. Part of it is they’re very collective, so there’s that tension.
I would say the Bible talks about both identities, or realities, very well. Paul talks about everything as your responsibility, but at the same time, the “you” that he uses is very plural and talks about group responsibility.
I don’t bring the intimate answers or understandings of racial dynamics in America. But I think I’m able to see the big picture of how collaboration among culture and ethnicity is really important for us as a single body to glorify God.
How can we be praying for you?
If you could pray, what I know and what I think I know is not absolutely true as God sees it. It’s my reality. And I really want my reality, the way I see the world around me, you know, the way I see people and culture and stuff to be more in line with how God sees it. Because I can personify my own pet peeves and frustrations, anger, and agenda and all that and make it as though it’s greater.
And pray for my family. I love being in Asia, but I miss them.
What do you envision for your future?
I’m 60. I have six, seven years left until I retire. Even after that, I’ll still do ministry. If God allows me to continue influencing staff at home, in Southeast Asia—to see them catching a vision—I will be very thankful to the Lord for that. I’ll be very grateful.
James Kang: A Heart for Asia
Written by Erin Chan Ding
Photos by Kristen L Norman
for The Navigators in Chicago
Nikki Janes: Seeking Light Through the Layers
When some people see an expo atmosphere, with swaths of tables set up by companies and organizations giving away free pens or t-shirts or other swag, they gravitate toward the freebies.
Not Nikki Janes.
Tables filled with freebies hardly ever appeal to her.
But one day at the start of her freshman year, she wandered the green space at the University of Illinois at Chicago, feeling the sun sting her eyes. She looked over at booths set up by dozens of campus student organizations and spotted sunglasses at a table by the Navigators Collegiate ministry. Against her impulses, she wandered over.
“I never walk up to these tables,” she says, laughing. “I must have been really desperate.”
The staff at the Navigators table gave Nikki a survey that asked some questions about her spiritual life.
Back then, Nikki would not have called herself a Christian. She wasn’t sure she believed God existed. Now, three years later, Nikki still does not call herself a Christian. She thinks she believes God, or a force of some kind, exists.
“I come from really wanting facts,” Nikki says. “Sometimes I rely on science to give me proof, but there are certain things that make me think about, ‘Well I can’t deny it, so maybe there is something bigger.’ I still don’t adhere to the foundational Christian beliefs, like Jesus is the Savior and Jesus was immaculately conceived, that the Bible [is infallible], but I’m more okay with the idea of there being a higher power now.”
Still, Nikki, now 21, has become embedded in the Navigators Collegiate community. She calls them another family. The ministry staff, especially her mentor, Abigail Jackson, with whom she meets for two hours a week, has embraced Nikki as she is.
Nikki and Abigail have become so close they even got tattoos together. Nikki chose a tattoo of a wave to remind her of trips to Lake Michigan with her mother, and that her moods, especially the depressive ones, come in waves. Abigail chose a tattoo of a marigold, symbolizing the sentiment from a Relient K song expressing, “I’m not the most amazing, extravagant, special person in the world, but to God, I’m chosen, I’m special, I have value.”
For Nikki, Abigail and the staff blew away her preconceptions of Christians as “old white people and wealthy.” It has become such a formative part of her college experience—she’s majoring in sociology and will graduate in May 2019—she recruits her friends and other students to The Navigators.
“One of the first things I tell people is, it’s not your typical Christian group,” Nikki says. “They just don’t push it on you. They just meet you where you’re at, which is really good.”
Abigail sees Nikki in all her layers—as an Asian American, a feminist, a gay woman, an agnostic explorer of Christianity, a lover of logic, a deep questioner—and together, they have formed a heartfelt, meaningful friendship.
“I’m proud of her, and I’m just really thankful to be a part of her life, and she’s willing to have a fair look at her own life and the things that are so important to me, which are God and Jesus,” says Abigail, 25, seated on a black couch in her light-splattered apartment on the border of Wicker Park and Humboldt Park. “She has been vulnerable, and she has been open.”
The beginning of Nikki’s story in America starts with her adoption at age one by a single, white mother, who adopted Nikki from the Yangxi area of China. Her mother was raised Lutheran. Nikki says she distinctly rejected her Asian American identity as a kid, framing herself through a white lens. As for church, she doesn’t remember ever going, though her mom did once tell her Nikki caused a ruckus after falling off a church pew.
Nikki grew up in a western Chicago suburb, attending Glenbard East High School, and was uninterested in many activities other than drawing. During her junior year of high school, a friend invited her to a dodgeball tournament at a local suburban church. Nikki made the church’s dodgeball team, and she started going to the church’s youth group. For the first time, she gained exposure to other Christians. It opened her up and stirred up a yearning to learn.
Before attending the high school group, Nikki says she was “pretty mean” about Christianity and all other faiths.
“I was an atheist, and I would go on about how all religions are bad,” she says. “I didn’t know anyone that was religious, and I wouldn’t even talk to them if I did.”
Her mom began attending the same church because of her daughter’s connection, and she still goes to Bible study there. For Nikki, the exposure to young Christians during high school made her less reticent about checking a box in that Navigators Collegiate survey her freshman year that said she was willing to be contacted. (This actually came after she first checked “no,” but she then drew arrows pointing to “yes.” “That’s me!” Nikki says. “Really indecisive, and then really trying to clarify everything.”)
Within a week, Nikki first met up with Shayna Wildermuth, co-director of Navigators Collegiate in Chicago, and Abigail at her dorm cafe.
“I felt badly that they paid money for cafeteria food,” Nikki says.
Still, they shared some of their life histories, and Nikki resonated with their openness and vulnerability.
“It didn’t feel like they were marketing the organization,” Nikki says. “It just felt like they were just trying to get to know me. They were telling the story about how Navs helped them . . . how they came to Navs and how they flourished from Navs.”
For the first few weeks, Nikki and Abigail bonded over their love of video games, and the first few times they met up, they just hung out in her dorm and played Super Smash Bros. on a Nintendo Wii.
At Abigail’s invitation, Nikki says she started going to an Encounter group “religiously—pun intended.” In Encounter groups, a small group of about five students meets to discuss parts of the Bible or topical studies. In the current one, called Thorns, the groups meet to discuss assumptions that keep people away from Christianity, such as “Christianity is . . . anti-LGBTQ+,” or “Christianity is . . . politically compromised.”
Nikki says she first started going to Encounter groups because it gave her something to do, but at the same time, “I realized I couldn’t be against something if I didn’t understand it. That wasn’t a fair assessment. I wanted to learn about the Bible and the stories and what was in it.”
For the past three years, Nikki has attended Encounter every week, as well as the monthly Nav Night gatherings at the UIC campus, diving into the Gospel of John, into Genesis and Acts, and into intense, theoretical discussions with Abigail.
As Nikki and Abigail sit together on the couch in Abigail’s living room, it’s clear they have a deep relationship brimming with trust. They both sport short, funky hair, glasses, meaningful tattoos, and laidback demeanors.
Nikki credits Abigail, who is half-Filipina, with helping her expand her appreciation of her own Asian American identity. Abigail will, Nikki knows, listen to everything she wants to say. Abigail is, in many ways, a big sister who informs her, advises her, but never pushes her.
With Abigail, Nikki can pare down what’s essential. She says she has realized this about her magnetism toward The Navigators:
“I want to believe. I saw these people are just so happy and hopeful, and they seem to feel safe and confident in who they are, and they seem to flourish and thrive, and they owed it all to Christianity and God. I wanted to also flourish and thrive, and I wanted to have the hope that they have.
They’ve just been great role models. I wanted to be that kind; I wanted to be that giving. I wanted to seem to have a smile on my face all the time. They attributed that all to Jesus. I wanted to know that experience. I wanted to know that rebirth they seemed to have through Christianity. And so I was like, ‘If I just go to enough meetings, if I just learn enough, I will see the light, and I will be a Christian. I will be hopeful, too. I will be happy.’
My mind just so needs proof all the time. No matter how much I want to believe in Christianity and want to adhere to it, I can’t get past some of the foundational elements, so I’m still not a Christian. But I really want to be. So I keep going, hoping that one day, it’ll just click for me. That’s really the biggest thing.
Someone else said, ‘If you’re not a Christian, you don’t go to heaven, so you might as well be a Christian, just in case.’ I was like, ‘No. If I’m going to believe, I’m going to believe it genuinely and authentically and fully. ‘Cause that’s not fair to me or to Christianity. I can’t just have it as a backup if this is something people devote their lives to. I need to care about it enough to say, ‘I’m a Christian.’ There should be no fear of what will happen if I’m not. It should be about just wanting to know God.”
As Nikki says this, Abigail turns toward her on the couch, looks into her eyes, and tells her this:
“I’ve told you this before, but I feel like you have grown so much this year in yourself—even in how you carry yourself. I know sometimes you feel like you haven’t progressed or something, but I see it, just because we’ve been having these conversations, the depth of them, and we’ve been in each other’s lives for so long.
I’m not discouraged because I’m not trying to force you into anything that you’re not ready for, ‘cause if my relationship with you depended on your response or whatever, that is not me following Jesus because God loves us regardless of whether or not we respond to His love. I feel like we’ve built up our relationship enough that I’m not going to give up on you or leave you.”
The honesty and vulnerability between them feels so pure, even the streaming light looks clearer. One can’t help but believe Abigail will keep her word, that the sincerity and profundity between them will continue, and that they’ll be in each other’s lives — always.
Erin Chan Ding is a freelance journalist with The Navigators in Chicago.
James Brooks: Meeting God on the Concrete
Six years ago, James Brooks fell to the concrete floor of his prison cell. His “cellie,” or cellmate, usually never left during yard time. But that day felt different—and it was. That day, when the call came to exercise, his cellmate jumped up from his bed and threw on jogging pants.
“Where you going, cellie?” James asked him.
“I’m going out,” he told James. “I just feel like going out and walking around.”
Then it was just James, alone in his cell.
“That was God,” James says of those moments. “He did that for me so I could have that time with Him.”
Alone, with God, James felt tears burst from his eyes as he fell to the prison floor.
He sobbed, and through it all, he heard God whispering to him.
“He was telling me, ‘You said you’re ready.’” James says. “’You said you want to change.’”
James realized he did. His mother had wanted this for James his whole life, but at that moment, at nearly 60 years old, James wanted it for himself.
On his bare knees, he acquiesced. He opened his heart.
“I surrendered to God,” he says. “It was so beautiful.”
Life did not always look so beautiful for James, even when he did not find himself surrounded by concrete floors and metal bars.
James grew up on the West Side of Chicago, in the Lawndale neighborhood.
Born right in the middle of five kids—James has two older sisters and a younger sister and brother—he came of age in the 1960s. He remembers Lawndale as a neighborhood where people cared about each other and hung out, talking on their stoops.
In 1966, he lived a half-mile away from Martin Luther King Jr. when King bolstered the Chicago Freedom Movement by renting an apartment on South Hamlin Avenue to highlight racial inequities in housing and economics.
One day, while walking along 16th Street and Ridgeway Avenue, James says he ran into King.
“You’re a great man!” he blurted out.
He shook King’s hand, and King replied, “God bless you, son.”
At Farragut Career Academy High School, James considered himself a jock, playing wide receiver and a defensive end so well he contemplated college football and just maybe, a career in the National Football League.
That ended when, at 18, he and his high school sweetheart found out they were pregnant.
“You got her pregnant,” James says his dad told him. “Your duty as a man is to marry her.”
So in 1971, James dropped out of high school and got married.
His young wife had their baby, a son. But the baby came too early and died.
“He was too small,” James says. “He didn’t have a name yet.”
He and his wife’s fledgling marriage disintegrated.
To earn money, James turned to something he had done for his father since he turned 10 years old: paint.
His father owned a family painting business, Brooks and Company, and the strong smell of paint compounds had been an integral part of James’s boyhood.
His uncles painted. His brother painted. He painted.
In 1975, James’s father died, and the family business fell to him. Shortly afterward, family infighting broke the business apart.
James joined the Painters District Council, the union that ensured decent pay and steady work. He’d stay with it for more than three decades.
During this time, the crack cocaine epidemic raked through America’s urban areas, and James became one of tens of thousands who got hooked.
He dealt crack. He smoked crack. And it led him to stronger drugs, like heroin.
He stayed in that world because of his habit. He kept at it because he saw easy money. By that time he had two daughters and he still dabbled in painting. But he couldn’t function without drugs.
Money from painting wasn’t enough.
So he stole—frequently and prolifically.
“I used to stick people up,” he says. “I needed to support my habit.”
Once, as he exited a motel with wads of cash, a clerk tried to stop him. He says she reached for him, he rushed out, and she fell and “busted her knee.”
James was charged and convicted of aggravated robbery and served his first prison sentence.
Several years later, James found work in the Chicago suburb of Wheaton, the idyllic town that is home to Wheaton College, which has such alumni as Christian giants Billy Graham and Jim and Elisabeth Elliott. The town also harbors a reputation as the epicenter of churches. James, with his affable smile and gentle demeanor, blended in, gaining the trust of people for whom he painted.
Except drugs still shadowed him.
He would burglarize houses in Wheaton—“I learned how to disarm alarm systems and all that stuff”—and then go into Chicago to meet up with his drug contacts.
When those who knew him found out the charges against him, they were in disbelief.
“Not Mr. Brooks,” they would respond in surprise.
“People just loved me,” James says.
He estimates he committed 33 burglaries in Wheaton. In 2010, he got caught for three of them. James, in his late 50s then, would spend the next six years in prison.
It started badly. James got in a fight with a cellmate inside of Lawrence Correctional Center in Sumner, a rural community in Illinois, and stabbed him because “he stole from me.”
Actual knives, of course, were contraband, so he fashioned his own weapons out of things like gum and bits of wax.
Then his mother, who was well into her 90s, died. Imprisoned, he could not attend her funeral.
But in thinking about his mother, he remembered how she raised him in the church. It had been head knowledge back then, and the message of Jesus’s death and resurrection for James had not struck his soul.
Until that day on the prison floor in April 2012, when James’s “cellie” went out for a walk. After James’s personal miracle of the heart in his prison cell, James found ample opportunity for spiritual development while in prison. He found a community of other Christians willing to invest in him. He got his GED, or high school general equivalency diploma. He joined a Bible study that met every day.
“You got a lot of people in prison who are saved,” he says. “Although they’re incarcerated, they’re free.”
As 2016 neared, a friend approached him, holding out a pamphlet for Bridge to Freedom, a faith-based residential re-entry program founded by Mica Garrett, now on staff with The Navigators, who also spent time incarcerated and experienced the transforming love of Christ while in prison. After having to forge her own re-entry experience without much outside support, she has resolved to do better for those going through something similar.
While still in prison, James filled out the application for Bridge to Freedom and wrote Mica a three-page letter sharing his story.
Two weeks later, she responded, telling him, “You’ve got a place to come to.”
These days, James lives in a quaint brick house used by Bridge to Freedom on the far South Side of Chicago. His live-in residential mentor, Peter Berghoff, whom James calls his best friend, spends time discussing the Bible with James. They do devotions nearly every day.
“When you come to that program, everyone is one,” he says. “We’re there to serve God.”
He smiles at the memory of the time he first stepped inside his new home church, Beverly Covenant Church, and realized he was not only the sole black man but also the youngest person there. All the others, he says, were white and in their 70s.
Still, they accepted James with warmth into their congregation, and he now worships and serves there.
At Bridge to Freedom, he helps prepare food when the organization is asked to cook for events. (Catering is part of how Mica fundraises for the organization.) At a recent Chicago Navigators event on a South Side beach, James did all the barbecuing.
During weekdays, James works—once again with paintbrushes.
On a Tuesday afternoon several weeks ago, James stood on the first step of a ladder on the second floor of a brick condominium building in Oak Park, just minutes from where he grew up in Lawndale. A paint color called Wilmington Tan splatters his loafers and white work clothes as he applies it just under the crown molding of the two-bedroom condominium.
It’s there where he chats while he paints, joking he can do both because “I’m just that talented.”
James gives a smile as wide as a semi-truck, and calls himself “still a work in progress.”
He has struggled with his health, from vascular disease requiring heart stents, from colon cancer—from which he has recovered—and the remnants of three gunshot wounds collected during his “druggie days.” He says if one of the bullets had hit him three centimeters over, he could have been paralyzed. Now, though, in his mid-60s, he reaches up and paints, as limber as a man in his 30s.
At the Bridge to Freedom house, Mica says it’s “huge” that James has taken to mentoring the two other men going through a similar re-entry program.
“He has walked by faith within the program,” she says, adding he’s eager to follow advice from his own mentors, like Peter.
Though James officially graduated from Bridge to Freedom in January, he says he plans on spending another year at the house and painting in Chicago in order to make sure he has enough savings to retire. He wants to move to San Antonio, where a brother and a sister live.
Though he didn’t have much of a past relationship with his two daughters, now in their 40s, he says “they’re proud of me—now.”
His boss, Kevin, took a chance on him, even with his past felonies, because he trusted him. Kevin isn’t a Christian, James says, but he says they talk all the time about God.
James has quit drugs, and doesn’t touch the cigarettes he once smoked either. He says in prison, he couldn’t access the drugs he once craved. After his salvation moment in his prison cell, he says he lost any desire to pick back up with his drug habit.
“If it hadn’t been for prison, I might have been dead by now,” he says. “Prison saved my life.”
James pauses and sits on the windowsill of the condo he’s painting in Oak Park. The sunlight hits the snow outside, streams through the glass and bounces off the paint tarps inside. It illuminates James’s face, which for a few moments, glows.
He looks up, and smiles. No burdens seem to weigh on him, and he looks, as much as a man can, at peace.
“My transition has been beautiful,” he says. “God is holding me.”
Story by Erin Chan Ding
Photos by Kristen L Norman
Sonja Sampson: Escaping the Darkness
Sonja Sampson stood at a bus stop in Englewood and closed her eyes.
When she did, she tried to envision her future. She saw nothing. Just darkness. Just a blanket of black.
She tried again. She wanted to see something, to envision anything.
“You know, when you close your eyes, you might see somebody running past?” she says now, 15 years later. “It was just plain, jet black. I hoped something would come, but it never came.”
That scared her. Her life up until then had been a swirl of drugs and parties. It got so bad she lost custody of her four kids. But losing them did not compel her to change. The darkness, however, did.
January 13, 2002. That was the day at the bus stop. The blackness shook Sonja to her depths. She called her father, who picked her up and drove her to a drug rehabilitation center.
She had tried before and been in and out of drug treatment centers. But this time, at Haymarket Center’s West Loop location, it stuck. She didn’t want to go back to the blackness.
It had been well over a decade since the very first time Sonja got high.
“The bottom is the moment you take that first hit,” she says. “That’s the bottom right there.”
It started when she was a teenager with weed. She moved to crack and to cobbled-together drug cocktails, cut with nail polish or even embalming fluid.
“It was an escape,” she says.
Childhood, for Sonja, was harsh. Her mom called her and her sister cruel names. She swore at them.
“They were real strict,” Sonja says of her mom and grandma, who said she could rarely leave the house as a child. “As soon as we were able to, we were up and out.”
Sonja was 16 years old when she had her first child; a couple of years later, she had her second. Shortly after that, the father of her children was shot and killed.
“That’s when everything started to spiral down,” she says.
Sonja spent her life all over Englewood, at 54th and Aberdeen Streets, 57th and Elizabeth Streets and then at 51st and Bishop Streets.
“51st and Bishop was the hardest turn in my life,” she says. “Everyone on the whole block was doing drugs and drinking.”
Sonja stood there on a recent Monday afternoon, dressed in black and gesturing while standing in a vacant lot of overgrown grass. She gazes across the grounds, an arm gesturing, her brown eyes peering through ebony glasses and letting memories wash over her in the spot where she used to live, when the drug addiction started and her kids were taken away.
Here, too, she had to deal with her first husband.
The first time he hit Sonja was their wedding day.
“I had on a certain outfit and had a couple of buttons loose,” she says, “and he said, ‘We’re married now, button it up!’”
He pushed her, hit her. Sometimes, she would fight back.
“It was straight up like men in a street fight,” she says. “It was terrifying.”
She found out her husband was manic depressive. The abuse continued. But she stayed, partly because she found out she was pregnant and partly because she craved the company.
“I was so scared of growing old alone,” she says.
Together, they continued with the drugs.
“He wanted to get high, so I got high with him, and it led to me not wanting to stop.”
Her husband, she says, had two other children outside of their marriage. A few years later, he served her with divorce papers, and Sonja was relieved.
Still, the drug addiction continued. During this period, she dabbled in petty crime, racking up a record and jail stints for retail theft. One day, her sister called the police when Sonja left her children at home to go get high. Her youngest child was not yet in kindergarten.
“I can’t believe I was so strung out that I left them alone,” she says. “I was confused. It was my fault.”
Her kids would be gone for seven years.
It wasn’t until after Sonja’s stay at the Haymarket Center—she spent six months in treatment and six months in recovery—that Sonja got her kids back from foster homes and extended family members.
Getting them back was an adjustment.
“It was something I wasn’t used to,” she says. “It was all four of them, plus a grandchild.”
Sonja started work as a cashier at a neighborhood McDonald’s. Four years later, she got another job behind the cash registers at a neighborhood Burger King.
“Working in fast food is horrible,” she says, citing the environment.
After seven years at Burger King, Sonja needed to take a few months off for knee surgery. After she healed, she showed up at Burger King, ready to resume work, only to find out her boss hadn’t held her job.
“I cried,” she said.
Her second husband, Stephen Giddens, who treated her well, picked her up.
Soon after, she happened to grab a flyer. It had information for Breaking Ground, a program of I-58, a mission of The Navigators focused on investing in and lifting up under-resourced communities. Sonja went through the APL Teaching Factory, a vocational program at Breaking Ground. (APL stands for “A Planting of the Lord” from Isaiah 61:3.) She was trained on computer skills and nabbed her APL certificate.
“I liked Breaking Ground most because of the spiritual aspect it had,” Sonja says, citing support from mentors like longtime staffer Connie Milton.
“I remember leaving [Breaking Ground] and being like, ‘There’s something still missing,’” she continues. “It made me realize God was missing out of my life. I had a good husband, nice friends, but without God, life was a wreck.”
At the same time, Sonja went searching for a neighborhood church. Her permanent worship home, she resolved, would be the first church in which someone took the time to greet her.
She went to about three churches where no one said anything to her. And then, when she was about to give up, it happened at Bread of Life Missionary Church on 63rd Street: a woman reached out with a smile and words of welcome.
Months later, she and her husband were baptized there.
“That spirituality was something I never had,” Sonja says of the guidance she received at Breaking Ground and at her local church.
Sonja, now a grandmother of four, loved Breaking Ground so much she went back to volunteer about two years ago, performing janitorial services. Shortly after, Doug Welliver, the former chief operating officer at Breaking Ground, hired and trained her.
“Sonja was a valuable team member,” Welliver says. “She assumed ownership of the jobs she was given and proactively looks for opportunities to save money or otherwise strengthen the organization. She was also very teachable and humble.”
Sonja says she was awestruck at where her career went with Breaking Ground. She has a job now in which, unlike her years at the fast food restaurants, she gets the chance to sit at a desk. Not only that, she works with computers daily and has a role in transforming lives like hers.
“I still can’t believe it,” says Sonja, 50. “I didn’t have a high education. I never looked forward to a future. When it was, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’ It was, ‘Hopefully alive!’”
Sonja worked at Breaking Ground for five years, ultimately becoming assistant to the chief operating officer. More recently, she became a home health aide, a job she credits Breaking Ground with helping her qualify for when a lawyer provided by the organization helped her through the process of expunging her criminal record. She was able to do this expungement under state law but credits Breaking Ground with giving her the courage to pursue it.
At about the same time Sonja volunteered and then began work at Breaking Ground, Sonja experienced heartbreaking loss. In the course of three months, her mother, father-in-law, and cousin died. And then in August 2015, as the result of an infection in his gum, her husband had a massive heart attack. He died, too.
Breaking Ground staffers attended her mother’s and husband’s funerals and provided emotional support. She goes to therapy regularly at an office a couple of miles east of her brick house near 63rd Street.
“If it wasn’t for me getting into Breaking Ground, I probably would have been still miserable with my husband passed,” she says. “I probably would have went back to drugs.”
Her dream now, she says, is to watch her grandkids grow. On her kitchen wall in Englewood, she’s taped a collection of index cards, each one containing her granddaughter’s spelling words: big, see, number, people. She wants to mentor her grandkids, to steer them toward a journey different from her own. She has lived a life filled with pain, yes, but also one abounding with redemption.
“I don’t say that Breaking Ground saved my life,” she says. “I say they made me realize my life was worth saving.”
Erin Chan Ding is a freelance journalist with Chicago Navigators.
A Professional Big Sister
On a recent Nav Night, in a room at the student center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Alejandra Villa raised her hand during an icebreaker game in which everyone had to describe something interesting about their footwear.
“This is Johnny,” she says, gesturing to the student standing next to her, “and his shoes have taken him across the Golden Gate Bridge.”
Everyone clapped for Alejandra and Johnny, and she beamed at the students.
Her shining brown eyes, her own laidback brown sandals, her nose ring and her unpretentious demeanor helped her blend into the group of late teens and early 20-somethings in an unassuming way.
Happiness filled the room that night, but for Alejandra, called “Ale” by some friends and students, being on staff with The Navigators has not always been so emotionally smooth.
Her decision to join the Navigators was a difficult one for her parents. It created some tension in their relationship. Yet, over time, they have become more comfortable with her life in ministry, a development Alejandra pondered on a recent Friday while sitting at the kitchen table of her West Town neighborhood.
“They’re so much more accepting of my ministry than they initially were,” she says. “I don’t know what happened. It’s God.”
Her story, of course, begins with her parents, who had known each other since they were 3 years old. Both grew up in rural communities near Aguascalientes, a city in the center of Mexico known for its ornate Spanish colonial buildings and its surrounding hot springs.
In 1988, her parents got married in Mexico. The next day, they moved to the United States.
One year later, they had Alejandra. Born in Santa Barbara, California, Alejandra moved with her parents to Yuma, Arizona, when she was five years old. After Alejandra’s birth, four more girls followed.
“It’s really fun,” she says, and then thinking of all the females surrounding her father, she laughs, adding, “I know. Poor guy!”
Alejandra found out about The Navigators almost by accident. She was spending a year of college at the University of Kansas when she overheard her roommate talking about a Navigator summer training program in Jacksonville, Fla., that included small groups, Bible studies, and evangelism on the beach.
Curious, she asked her roommate if she could attend a Navigator event, and things got started. But it didn’t start out too well. The first Nav Night she attended, “I didn’t love, to be honest. I didn’t feel like I fit in (demographically), but I did like the messages I heard about God and about the Bible.”
She adds, “There was a level of distrust because I was Catholic, so knowing that Navs was not Catholic, it was just kind of scary for me.”
She really got to know The Navigators, she says, when her roommate asked if they could host a Bible study in their dorm room.
The in-depth relationships formed by The Navigators, however, made the deepest impression a year later, when she transferred to the University of Arizona in Tucson.
The campus director there hosted an event in which he asked students to clean and renovate his family’s home.
“That seemed very unconventional, and maybe some people would think that’s a bad idea,” Alejandra says. “But it seemed great to me, and I got to know him and his family. I pretty quickly realized I had never met someone who cared so much about other people the way he did. That had a huge impact on me.”
One more relationship made Alejandra realize she wanted to make The Navigators a central part of her life and career. She had joined a Bible study led by a girl named Jillian, who was a year older than Alejandra.
At the time, Alejandra found herself in the middle of a breakup.
“For a 20-year-old girl, it’s just a really devastating thing,” Alejandra says. “For anyone, really.”
Jillian made herself available to Alejandra—every week. Once a week, they sat down for coffee and in-depth conversation full of discipleship and meaning and God.
“I wasn’t used to treating myself very kindly,” Alejandra says. “I didn’t know people who were so gracious, so I think that’s what had a lasting impact. Her meeting with me weekly and just being there with me during hard times and how loving she was toward me really made me want to go on staff.”
After graduating from college with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education, Alejandra felt tugged toward the 10/40 Window, a reference to a part of the world thought to have the least access to Christianity.
“Really, it was the sheer number of people who didn’t know Christ or Christians,” Alejandra says, which prompted her to sign up for iEDGE, a two-year opportunity to serve alongside long-term Nav missionaries around the world.
She was assigned to Southeast Asia, and while there, she started a master’s program in English instruction. One of her most meaningful relationships in the country, which is not being named for the safety of the overseas NavMissions staff, started when she was introduced to a young woman there who was learning Spanish. Elena wanted someone else who spoke Spanish to converse with her. Alejandra and Elena became good friends, even taking trips to Borneo and Cambodia together.
Elena didn’t know God, and “up until the time that I left, whenever she was asked whether she wanted to read the Bible, she said ‘no,’” Alejandra recalls. So Alejandra and Elena just had fun together, speaking Spanish and investing in each other’s lives.
And then, a year and a half after Alejandra finished her iEDGE ministry, she got a Skype call from Elena.
Elena told Alejandra—in Spanish—that she had accepted Christ.
“I cried for a couple of days,” Alejandra says. “It was special, too, that she called me to tell me. She knew how much it would mean to me.”
After her stint at Yuma, Matt Podszus, who had directed Navs Collegiate at the University of Kansas when Alejandra was there, reached out to Alejandra. He had moved with his family to Chicago to start a collegiate ministry there.
Alejandra, he says, was on a list of people he really wanted on his team. He talks of her sensitive spirit, her pure soul, her working through her parents’ initial resistance to her ministry, and her effortless connection to college students.
He says he suspected Alejandra’s perspective and voice would bring fruitfulness to the efforts of Navs Collegiate in Chicago.
“This has proven to be more true than I could've hoped,” Matt says. “I don't think Ale realizes how thoughtful and insightful she is. She really sees people for who they are.”
Alejandra accepted Matt’s invitation to come to Chicago last August because, she says, “Ever since I’ve known Christ, I think there’s no way I’d rather spend my time than telling people about Him and having intentional conversations with people, hoping to talk about Him.”
Matt says he always tells Alejandra “her vision and leadership spring from her love from others. This is so like Jesus! God has shaped this woman through her personality, upbringing and choices to offer such a beautiful contribution to our work here. Every day I am grateful to God for leading her here!"
Alejandra has a particular interest at the University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC, in students who might be on the margins, focusing specifically on investing the lives of young Latinas and in commuter students at UIC.
“We’re really trying to figure out how to build community among commuter students,” says Alejandra, who shares an apartment in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood with two roommates and a spirited German Shepherd mix. “I really want to see if we can build a sense of ownership from leading commuter students to realize their potential impact on the city and on students at UIC.”
The kind of investment Jillian made in her at the University of Arizona bears itself out now in the way Alejandra interacts with students on campus, from the way students open up their lives to her to the way a group of them can absorb her, almost as one of them, without inhibitions. In addition to commuter students, her heart embraces Latina students who may have interest in The Navigators but may need a fellow Latina’s sensitivities to help guide them.
Abigail Jackson, who serves on Collegiate Navs staff with Alejandra, says, “She not only knows how to help people grow, but she’s also so sensitive to how people are receiving the information. She’s always thinking from other people’s perspectives. She has such a cool perspective and just a noble heart because she’s a Latina, a Mexican-American woman in Chicago 2017. There’s a lot going on today, but I feel like she’s given the Latina women in our community such a sweet role model.”
As for Alejandra, being on a college campus speaks to both her identity as a Christ follower and to an identity that has been with her lifelong, ever since her parents gave birth to her, the first of five.
“Being on a college campus,” she says, “just makes me feel like a professional big sister.”
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Written by Erin Chan Ding, freelance journalist with The Chicago Navigators.
Photo Credit, Kristen L. Norman
From Asia to Ames to Chicago: How God Uses a Global Identity to Impact 20-Somethings
Matt* wears a silver ring on his right hand etched with five ancient characters that means “citizen of heaven.”
Designed and given to him by his parents when he turned 21 years old and taken from Philippians 3:20, the ring in many ways symbolizes the intersections of his life. Born in East Asia, Matt spent 18 of his 22 years shaped by the Asian continent, both in surroundings and culture.
“I’ve always had role models of what it would look like to walk with Christ and make decisions based on their faith,” says Matt. “And I have always been around my parents’ friends, who also have had very deep walks with God for a very long time.”
What he remembers are a flow of guests staying the night, even when their family of four lived in a small apartment in one of Asia’s largest cities. It’s something that has influenced him to this day, and Matt often ushers friends new and old in and out of his Chicago apartment. When an overseas team of Navigators Collegiate students gathered in Chicago before an international flight, Matt hosted them, too.
Matt has taken a circuitous route to Chicago and to the city’s Nav20s ministry for Millennials and young professionals. Like other divergent points in his life, Chicago is exactly where he sensed God’s prompting.
On a recent Thursday, Matt, dressed in dark jeans and a long-sleeved button-down shirt, rode his black commuter bike from his job at a transportation company, to a nearby pizzeria. Despite his slim frame, which stands at just over six feet, Matt consumes two-thirds of a medium deep-dish pizza.
“I’m a big eater,” he says, mocha-colored eyes twinkling, in a bit of an understatement.
In East Asia, Matt went to a local school up until fifth grade, becoming fluent in the national language before switching to an international school, where he found a global mix of friends from countries like Sweden, Canada, Australia, Korea and the U.K.
“I had a lot of Korean friends,” he says. “I played a lot of soccer with them, so I know some Korean phrases.”
In high school, after his older brother graduated and moved away, God began an awakening in Matt.
“I felt like God was telling me to just bring Christ into the relationships I already had,” he said.
Matt led a Bible study on Friday nights for a half dozen guys on his basketball team, going through Proverbs and Mark.
“They would come mainly for the free food and to hang out at my place and play some games,” Matt says. “We had Bible discussion and it was a time when I really began to identify my faith with my friends. We were able to deepen our relationships a lot because they were able to understand a part of me.”
Matt knew he would move to the United States for college, but he didn’t expect at first to end up in Iowa. He had already been accepted to the University of Minnesota, resolving to study business there. He had put down his deposit. He had even become Facebook friends with his roommate.
And then, he felt God’s prompting. God, he felt, was directing him to go to the little town of Ames, Iowa, to attend Iowa State University.
Because his dad happens to be from Iowa, Matt received in-state tuition. But there was more than that waiting for him there. There was a business program which potential employers told him would allow him to apply his global experience to the workplace. But at Iowa State,there also thrived a melded community of The Navigators, which embraced Matt.
“That was the first time I really believed God could use my life to impact others and be part of his greater mission,” Matt says.
During his first year at Iowa State, Matt did a two-month program with Navigators Collegiate in which he and a group read books, memorized Scripture, shared their testimonies and delved into how God might want to use their lives to impact others.
Later on, Matt helped lead a team of Navigator Collegiate students to East Asia, where they spent a couple of months building relationships with young people overseas. Those Navigators Collegiate trips from Iowa State continue now, even after Matt’s graduation.
Matt’s arrival in Chicago followed a similar path of heeding God’s whisper. Matt had felt excited by the offer by a global rotational job program, in which he’d train in Germany, followed by international rotations.
“It kind of satisfied my own desires,” he says, “but I felt Chicago was where I needed to be.”
A few months before Matt graduated, in March 2016, he traveled to Chicago to meet Jay Neuharth, the director of Navs Chicago, and other Chicago-based staff.
“It just felt right,” Matt says.
With a lot of prayer and guidance, he said no to the rotational opportunity and yes to a job in Chicago.
On a sun-drenched Friday at his office, where Matt is part of a team that processes shipments for global clients, he turns on the company’s software platform, grinning as he zooms in on ships carrying thousands of electronics.
He has also seen his own faith growing new roots since moving to Chicago, attending Nav20s gatherings, and speaking at Navs Collegiate panels.
Navigators Chicago Director Jay Neuharth says Navigators Chicago “is led by people like Matt.”
His overseas background, Jay says, “gives him perspective that few people here have, yet he is comfortable in Chicago, and enjoys the fun here, and the diversity. He has a passion for Christ which is contagious, and he is always ready to help a friend in need.”
Matt has also dived into his community at Church of the Beloved in downtown Chicago, experiencing an unprecedented amount of personal growth.
“College was a really good time with learning how to share my faith with others and grow in all these ways and be discipled and disciple others,” Matt says. “But the Gospel of Christ dying for our sin so we can be reconciled with God, it was this theological thing for other people that I had to share with other people. But this year has been really good in understanding my own sin and my own need for the God of the universe to die for me — and not just for other people so I can tell them about it. That’s been very sweet.”
At the same time, Matt has been building community among his generation. Just that morning of the pizza lunch, a young woman in his small group e-mailed him and a few others to thank them for showing up to a barbecue and birthday party in her co-worker’s honor, who was from Singapore but had been training in Chicago.
The love and kindness the co-worker felt, she told them, wasn’t on the “average societal norms.” She asked for prayer for her co-worker, prompting Matt to realize he wanted to do the same thing for his own colleagues.
“I probably should pray more for my co-workers because I would be more burdened for them and see more opportunities,” he says.
Getting to know his co-workers has also helped him build community in Chicago. Every week in the summer, he plays with a group of co-workers on the volleyball team at North Avenue Beach.
“I didn’t realize Chicago actually had beaches” before moving, he says, laughing.
In seriousness, the city and this period of his life, coupled with his global identity, has positioned him to build relationships with other Millennials.
Chicago, he says, “gives me some form of cultural competency to relate to a lot of different types of people. I understand the struggle of not fully belonging to one place or not being fully understood or fully known because of my cultural background, so I’ve been able to relate to a lot of people.”
At their core, 20-somethings, he says, seek meaning and relationship.
“When you talk about Millennials being cynical toward theinstitution of the Church, maybe many Millennials haven’t had the chance to interact on a peer level with people who have genuine walks with Christ and not an organized, bureaucratic institution,” Matt says. “People are looking for something bigger to be a part of, and I think that’s where the gospel and Kingdom work can be very attractive for Millennials, where we’re called to something bigger, and we’re called to something greater.”
For those wanting to reach out, there’s a “citizen of heaven”— equipped with an unthinkable appetite and a smile just as giant — waiting to connect.
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*Name withheld for security reasons.
Written by Erin Chan Ding, freelance journalist with the Chicago Navigators
Photo Credit Kristen L. Norman
A Home Away from Home
Aaron and Amy Lee* treat their home in Chicago’s northern suburbs a little like they did their home in Africa: with openness. The backyard, suited for their three boys (and another little guy due in August), shouts invitation.
And that’s just how the refugee families they meet see it, too.
Not long ago, a refugee family they had met from Afghanistan came over to visit, unannounced. The Lees weren’t home, but the family stayed, unleashing their kids in the backyard to play.
The next time they saw each other, the parents told the Lees, “Our kids enjoyed playing in your backyard!”
Sitting in their living room on a recent Friday, the Lees grin. That’s just how they want it.
“We want to focus on loving our neighbor, on opening our home to them,” Aaron says. “And on bringing them into our lives.”
This wasn’t exactly how Aaron imagined his life as a little boy, but it has how God has worked things out, and how a dream partly lived can continue.
Since he was young, Aaron had longed to become an overseas missionary. In fact, as little kids, Aaron and I happened to be in Rainbow Club together, which was how our parents kept us kids occupied while they, nearly all from Hong Kong, attended a Cantonese-speaking, bi-weekly fellowship at Chinese Christian Union Church in Chicago.
Even now, three decades later, I remember us all sitting in a circle as our Rainbow Club teacher asked us to take turns sharing what we wanted to do when we grew up. My answer changed every few months—I wanted to become a firefighter and then a paleontologist and then a neurosurgeon. Instead, I became a journalist.
Not Aaron. He was steadfast. I remember him telling us, “When I grow up, I want to become a missionary in another part of the world and tell people about Jesus.”
I remember being impressed by his conviction. But I didn’t think much of it until two decades later when he and Amy, who jokes she “married into all this,” started raising money to go overseas with The Navigators.
And so, for nearly five years, from September 2010 to January 2015, the pair, along with their growing family, lived out Aaron’s dream as oversees missionaries for The Navigators in Africa, learning the local language and ministering to people who didn’t know Jesus.
But then, Amy experienced a dramatic turn in her health. She had always had eczema, but in Africa, it became full blown.
“There weren’t very many Asians in the city,” Aaron says, “and her language tutor came over, and she looks at Amy, and says, ‘Where’s Amy? I’m Amy’s friend.’”
Amy looked so different, her friend suggested Amy might need a doctor’s note to get back into the United States.
“By that point,” Amy says, “I didn’t look like my passport picture.”
Amy was also pregnant with their third child at the time, which further complicated her health issues. The Lees had no choice. They had to come back to Chicago.
They had been back every couple of years for furloughs and for the births of their sons, but this felt different.
There was the obvious question of, “What are we going to do?”
But for Aaron, in particular, there was an adjustment to the vision he had for his life since he was a little boy in Rainbow Club.
“All I wanted to do was go overseas, so coming back, all that was gone,” he says. “And just hearing Jesus say, ‘Am I enough?’ And just being able to soak that in: Absolutely, Jesus is enough.”
After the Lees returned to the Chicago area, The Navigators suggested they take six months to rest and get healthy as they re-integrated.
Amy’s face stopped swelling. Her eczema cleared. She and Aaron had their third son, who’s now 2 years old. In their living room, he toddles around his parents, who sit on a couch near a table laden hand-woven baskets, wooden spoons and forks, and carved lions and giraffes, tactile reminders from their time living overseas. Keegan’s older brothers play with a Nintendo Wii in the basement, their occasional squeals punctuating their parents’ conversation.
As they settled back in Chicago, the Lees found the passion God had instilled in them had not changed.
“Our hearts were still for the nations and reaching the unreached people groups of the world,” Aaron says. “Our picture is being a light to the darkest places in the world, in particular places where we aren’t free to speak the name of Jesus.”
God started connecting them with person after person, merging their local environment with their global experiences.
The Lees, who once worked for World Relief, a Christian organization that serves refugees, reconnected with a refugee woman they met a decade ago. (As of January, more than 30,000 refugees have settled around the Chicago area since 2002, according to the Chicago Tribune.) Then, several months back, Aaron struck up a conversation with a family of refugees on the Chicago Transportation Authority’s Yellow Line train.
“They looked a little out of place,” Aaron says. “We invited them over. . . .”
“Actually, he invited himself over,” Amy says of Aaron, laughing.
The relationship has bloomed. The Lees have gone over to the family’s home and vice versa, and they have also met another refugee family from Afghanistan.
Given that some families speak Farsi or other languages the Lees don’t know, they say they rely mostly on some English, along with Google Translate, which has resulted in some amusing conversations.
A dad from a refugee family, Aaron recalls, was using Google Translate to invite them over for dinner. “And the translation came over, ‘We come poison food!’ I didn’t know if we should go!”
As they’ve gotten to know refugee families, the Lees have learned that several are dealing with high levels of trauma. Aaron recalls seeing a photo of a man he has befriended, sobbing near a blown-up mosque. The explosion had killed the man’s brother.
Others struggle with finances. Men and women who were doctors, lawyers, and engineers in their home countries settle for anything providing a consistent income in America, finding themselves cleaning airplanes and scrubbing toilets. Eighty to 90 percent of their take-home pay in America goes to paying rent.
“How do we help them develop holistically with their jobs, with economic development, with financial literacy?” Aaron asks.
He says through his work as a Navigator, along with Goodcity, an organization focusing on entrepreneurship, he has been able to visit mosques to talk to imams and sheikhs about candidates for employment or about those who might need help starting a business.
“We’re trying to give them a little bit of hope,” Aaron says. “We’re trying to empower them. We value the ability they have, and that just gives us a door into their lives and into their families and whatever’s going on. When I’m sitting down talking about a business plan, we’re talking about life.”
Aaron, who supervises some local Navigators staff with Nations Within, which focuses on people groups in the United States who are distinct from the majority culture, says he and Amy hope to build a team of people here who have a heart to reach people and families here who can then help reach the nations.
Even with potential government restrictions on the number of refugees to the United States, people from some of the hardest-to-reach countries are continuing to arrive in America, notes Aaron.
“They’re coming, and they’re our neighbors,” he says. “The desire is to see one household reached that can impact and reach other households around the world.
“Coming back, we’re seeing we can still be investing our lives in people anywhere we go, that we’re not restricted by location. Our calling is the same: to disciple people, wherever they are.”
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*Names have been changed due to the sensitive nature of the ministry.
Written by Erin Chan Ding, freelance journalist with the Chicago Navigators
Photo Credit Kristen L. Norman
Chicago On Their Hearts
-how God moved a pair of newlyweds from Kansas City to the Windy City to make disciples-
The whisper from God for Sarah Gummig came four and a half years ago, when one of her best friends died.
A drunk driver killed her friend, Michelle, in a car accident.
At the time, Michelle, 24, had been lonely, Sarah remembered. She had wanted a Christ follower to pour into her when she was in college, but she couldn’t find anyone through any of the Christian organizations on campus. So she drifted.
Sarah, a few years out of college by then, had been working in the corporate world in merchandising and then banking. But after Michelle’s death, God called her back to the college campus.
“I wanted to be available to really lonely women,” says Sarah, now 29, sitting on her carpet in Lakeview next to her 15-month-old daughter, Adelyn, who crawled next to her. “I wanted to be with women who felt like nobody else had time for them.”
Women like Michelle.
So began Sarah’s dive into working with The Navigators, something she had wanted to do since college, when The Navigators collegiate ministry at Northwest Missouri State University had poured into her.
God also used The Navigators to introduce Sarah to her husband, Brad.
Brad, like Sarah, grew up going to church. “I knew the right answers, I knew what to say and when to say it.”
But Brad turned into a bit of a party guy, especially in high school. Most of his friends went to the University of Missouri in Columbia, joined fraternities and continued to party. And in the beginning of his freshman year, Brad made plans to leave Northwest Missouri State and join them.
If he had done that, “I think my life would have looked a lot different,” says Brad, now 28.
His parents insisted he spend at least one year at Northwest Missouri State, essentially out of principle in honoring his commitment to attend. By the time the year was up, he had made new friends and decided to stay. Even more, he met Jesus.
For Brad, it started with filling out a spiritual interest survey for The Navigators. And then came a relentless first-year Nav staffer.
“For lack of a better term, he just kind of came to my door and harassed me and finally got me to a Nav Night and a Bible study,” Brad says. “For the first time, I saw guys that had a real relationship with Jesus.”
Sarah, meanwhile, felt God tugging her toward ministering to women in sororities. She soon realized she wanted to join the Greek system to make the kind of impact she wanted. “There’s a bond, like you’re sisters.”
Through a friend’s connection, she became a part of Sigma Sigma Sigma.
“It was definitely a cool sorority, but it was very broken—a lot of drugs, a lot of sex, a lot of partying,” Sarah says.
Sarah began praying for a helper in reaching Greek students, especially a guy. Then, in fall 2008, Sarah and Brad were both asked to emcee the weekly Nav Night on campus.
Soon after, Brad joined Sigma Phi Epsilon. He confesses that a year earlier he would have joined a fraternity “for booze and parties and girls.” But after his freshman year, Brad wanted to join so he could share Jesus with other guys in the Greek system.
Brad was the answer to Sarah’s prayers, in more than one way.
“We just fell in love,” Sarah says. “What should have taken 20 minutes to plan (for Nav Night), we’d always draw out to four hours.” Plus, he became a real partner in spreading the gospel.
A week after Brad graduated, they got married. Sarah had graduated the year before.
Throughout most of their college years, Brad and Sarah planned to join The Navigators full-time after graduation. They went to summer trainings to prepare. But during his senior year, God called Brad to full-time work in the business world.
After graduation they moved to Kansas City, and Brad took a job doing information technology in health care while Sarah took a job in merchandising, before transitioning to work at a bank two years later. Brad and Sarah faithfully ministered to their co-workers through Bible studies and fellowship. But in 2012, they both felt a similar tug.
“We had wonderful relationships with people, getting to share the gospel with people,” Sarah says. “But God was just slowly like, ‘Hey, yeah, there’s young professionals here, but there are other places I want you to trust me with.’ God placed the city of Chicago in our hearts.”
Neither of them had any real connection to the city. Sarah had visited once, for a merchandising trip during college. Brad had gone to Chicago for a concert and made a couple of other short visits.
Still, after giving their family in Kansas City time to digest the news, the couple moved to Chicago in January 2014 on an Amtrak train, lugging four giant suitcases in the middle of a snowstorm.
Sarah says, “It sounds silly now, but it was really of God.”
Brad entered the Chicago corporate world. There are stressors to his job with Strata Decision Technology, where he has a managerial role. His life, he says, has gone “from a walk to a jog, to a full sprint.”
The pressure from work—he’s often up at 1 a.m. with his laptop—has necessitated steps back to reflect and process. And to make more adjustments. Just that afternoon, he and Sarah say, they resolved to “live a quiet and humble life for God.”
At the same time, God has enabled Brad to minister in the workplace.
“From my vice president down to every team member, they are family,” he says. “Not only have they embraced me, but they have also welcomed Sarah and Adelyn into this family as well.”
The bonds with his co-workers, Brad says, have deepened in such a way that he and Sara “care deeply about their souls. As a couple, we have had the opportunity to share our lives, hearts, and the gospel with a handful of these co-workers in hopes they would be adopted into the Kingdom as brothers and sisters.”
When the Gummigs first moved to Chicago, there was just the beginnings of a Navigator collegiate movement. Matt and Kori Podszus had moved to Chicago from Kansas a year earlier to launch The Navigators collegiate ministry. They started with the University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC.
Sarah joined the pioneering team on campus—Brad started attending a Friday morning Bible study with Matt and some other young professionals who had recently moved to Chicago. Sarah began spending time weekly on the UIC campus. In the early days, Sarah, Matt, a volunteer named Marissa, who had been involved with The Navigator ministry at NYU, and a former staff member, Andrew Loewen, spent time at the UIC campus trying to build connections through spiritual surveys and initiating conversations.
At first, Sarah says, “it didn’t seem as though much was coming of my efforts.”
Then, in 2014, Sarah met Kjerstin Berg.
“She was definitely very lonely; she would say that, too,” Sarah says. “She was exactly the type of girl I was trying to meet.”
A girl like her friend, Michelle.
At first, Kjersten was resistant. But she liked Sarah. She opened up to her. Sarah and Kjersten began meeting every week. They started reading the Bible together. They had long conversations. Their friendship became real and deep. So did Kjersten’s relationship with God.
“She was very honest,” Sarah says. “Over the course of time, I could just tell she was falling in love with Jesus.”
Now, Sarah also invests her time with another college student, Kaitlyn. They meet every Thursday at Sarah and Brad’s walk-up apartment in Lakeview.
“We meet for about an hour, an hour and a half, and then we hang out for like four hours afterward,” Sarah says.
For Brad, it’s been a joy to see Sarah invest in these women’s lives through The Navigators.
“From the day we met, that was always her dream job,” he says. “It’s amazing to see the relationship she has with these girls now. It’s evident the impact she’s having. It’s really, really sweet to see that.”
They had some rare down time on a recent Sunday evening. Brad wears a backward Kansas City Royals baseball cap, and the couple digs into mac and cheese and carbonara pasta from DryHop Brewers a few blocks away.
Even then, they find themselves cleaning up Adelyn’s “Cheerio tornados” and tending to the little girl, who wears a pink bow in her dark brown hair—a few shades darker than her mother’s—when a cut lip makes her cry.
Despite the exhaustion of being new parents, the fruit of investing in the lives of others, comes in little reminders, like the handwritten note Sarah received this year from Kjerstin, the young woman who came into Sarah’s life a few years after the death of her friend, Michelle.
In purple pen, Kjerstin wrote this:
Sarah,
“…One of my resolutions is to outwardly express my gratitude to those who have positively influenced me. So hey…that’s you! Thank you for being such a strong and faithful woman of God. Your steadfast love for Him is beautiful, and something that I try to mold in my daily life. My respect and admiration for you is only overpowered by my love for you!
Love and Blessings,
Kjerstin
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Written by Erin Chan Ding
Photo Credit Kristen L. Norman
