"My Life is my Message"

Camp Micah (http://www.campmicah.ca/), an inter-denominational peace and justice leadership camp run the last week of August for high school students, was a new experience for us.

As Mennonites we kind of thought we had the market cornered on peace and justice work, and it was exciting and refreshing to work alongside Catholics and United Church friends to instill alternative leadership skills in youth with a focus on peace and justice. Camp Micah uses all the normal camp activities (canoeing, low-ropes, games, and campfires) to create awareness about the importance of peace and justice in our everyday lives, and to challenge us to think about how we live our lives and, ultimately, what type of message we share with others by how we live.

My life is my message...  It was a catchy phrase to put on the t-shirts for Camp Micah.

My life is my message… That’s an easy thing to say (or even to write), but it is meaningless without accompanying actions. 

My life is my message… Stop for a second and think about that phrase. 

We can all bring to mind famous examples of people who have really lived their messages:  Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. are some that come to mind. Why do these people come to mind? Not because of what they thought, but because of what they said and did.  It is easy for us to think theoretically about what it means to live our messages, but actually doing it is a lot harder.

This challenge comes at a fortunate time in our young lives. We just got married this summer and are in the process of determining how we live our lives together. This provides us the great opportunity and difficult challenge of deciding how we make our lives our message. What types of food are we going to buy (fair-trade, organic, bulk, local)? How much money are we going to give away in tithing and other giving? How are we going to spend our free time (volunteering, relaxing, working, writing)? Where do we want to live (in community, in a single-family dwelling, in Canada, in another country)? In the end, all of the choices we make will end up determining our message.

~Steve and Jessica Reesor Rempel

Steve and Jessica have been heavily involved in MCC, the church, and other not-for-profit organizations.  They met on Enlace in 2005, participated in the SALT program (Lao PDR and Bangladesh).  Steve is currently on staff with Mennonite Coalition for Refugee Support.