Being an Intern at the LA Tech Wesley Foundation - Khalilah

“Freedom is knowing that the seeds you’re sewing right now will prove to be fruitful in the future.”

Sometimes it seems the world is coming apart at the seams and putting itself back together. There is a falling apart of a false world and it is replaced by something beautiful. Sometimes something unfamiliar. The Wesley Foundation’s missionary internship program is teaching me how to see. How to see others in their joy and in their pain and how to see Jesus amongst the ruin. I am realizing that the internship is largely about trust. Ryan and Kaiti’s trust in us as interns and our trust in them as our spiritual directors. 

I am also trusting in the fruitfulness of the internship. I have tasted small portions of it. I have tasted its fruitfulness in the assigned readings, in conversations with students, in quality time with friends, in gathering for worship, and especially in prayer. And the fruitfulness seems so subtle, even quiet at times that if we don’t pay attention we are liable to miss out on the gifts that have been so freely given to us. I pray I always pay attention. 

The internship is teaching me how to see again. Prior to the internship, I don’t think I would have thought I was walking with blinders on. But I know that for a long portion of my Christian walk I only had eyes for my inadequacy. Our horizon carries with it a belly of hope. I had missed this hope. 

I know there are also things that are being developed in me by the internship that I cannot yet see. There is a discipline being developed as well as a bond between myself and the rest of the staff. I want us to be a family. We are cultivating, both within ourselves and in the community, a posture of openness and vulnerability. I think for the first time, at least the first time in a long time, I feel encouraged to trust myself; To trust myself to do the work and do it well. I won’t pretend that I am all the way there or that I always “feel” fully equipped but I know Ryan and Kaiti are doing something for me that I could not, cannot do for myself. I am grateful for them. 

I feel like I am relearning God. There is something about Him that I missed although I am having trouble naming what it is. But there is a roundness to His character that wasn’t there before. Perhaps this is what it means to get to know Him. 

And there is freedom in that. In knowing that I have only scratched the surface of who He is. There is freedom in giving myself to this internship, to the Wesley Foundation community, and in surrendering my will.