No Turkey, No Barriers

By Paul Spellings

Paul Spellings, a young man serving as the companion officer in the Diocese of Costa Rica, shares an important lesson realized in his first Thanksgiving in a foreign country.

This Thanksgiving I won’t be having turkey with friends and family, and while I won’t miss the turkey, I will miss being near the people who have been missing me since I moved down to Costa Rica to serve as the companion officer at the Diocese of Costa Rica. I am especially thankful, on my first holiday in a foreign country, that God’s imagination for community is larger than my own. I moved from college, studying and eating and playing with hundreds of people the same age, color and wealth as I am to a country where I’m younger and whiter than everyone I work with. So what I’m thankful for is what I want to share with every single person who comes down to work with us in Costa Rica while I’m here: working side by side for the Kingdom of God with anyone will bring you close to them over all the barriers that divide elsewhere. I’m glad the partners God chose for me are different than the ones I would have chosen for myself, and I’m thankful that Christian community with a bunch of middle-aged Costa Ricans sustains and encourages me just as much as Christian community with a bunch of kids my age and skin color. I’m thankful to be part of a Church that encourages diversity, so we all might learn this lesson. And I’m thankful to be doing my own small part, inviting missionaries into community with people who, they will discover, are more like themselves than they imagined. In the end, I can’t say it better than Dietrich Bonhoeffer does in his book, “Life Together”:

 “Christian community means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. There is no Christian community that is more than this and none which is less than this. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily community of many years, Christian community is solely this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.”