Three young women who have been an active part of our church are involved in mission work this year. When we started hearing their stories, it was too good to keep to ourselves.
~MAKE A DIFFERENCE WITH YOUR LIFE~
Grace Guyton ~ Kenya
Grace Guyton, daughter of Charlie and Meg Guyton, is a junior at Birmingham Southern College. She will be traveling to Nairobi, Kenya for a self-directed January term. She will be living in Langata (a suburb of Nairobi) and working with St. Peter’s United Methodist Church. When she had the opportunity to design her own trip, Grace talked to our Senior Pastor, Clarke Campbell-Evans who put her in touch with a variety of United Methodist mission contacts. One of those was United Methodist missionary John Calhoun who brokered the mission trip for Grace.
She will be working at the church in a variety of ways: Working with the day care center, helping out with their contemporary worship service, making pastoral care visits with the pastor of the church, Rev. Richard Muguongo.
“I’ve missed going on mission trips for the last few years since I started working at our United Methodist Youth camp in Leesburg during the summers,” Grace mused on why she was anxious to have a particular mission experience for her January term. “I wanted to go somewhere that was completely different than the United States and I’ve always had this fascination with Africa.
“My school had designed an Africa trip, but I was intrigued with the idea of not just going to Africa, but having the opportunity to make a difference there, if even in a small way. I know this sounds cliché, but how can you go there with an AIDS epidemic and rampant poverty and not volunteer to do something that would make a difference,” Grace said.
“We live in such a materialistic world that I hope to come back humbled. I want to look at the world differently. I want to learn from them about how they see their faith in Christ, how they understand God.”
Grace can be reached through her Birmingham-Southern email address: mgguyton(at)bsc.edu.
