Rosanna Soh is the mother to  4 children, 3 of whom are  Act Five alumni (Jacob, ’19-’20, Ellie, ’22-’23, Nathaniel, ’23-’24). She also served on the Act Five board from ’24-’25. 

Witnessing Change

He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ
Jesus.
— Philippians 1:6

What started as a gap year for one child became something much bigger. Over 4 years, three of our children journeyed through Act Five and changed our family in ways we never expected.

In 2018, when our oldest child, Jacob, was considering post-secondary education, we encouraged him to take a year to explore and gain some independence.
He was only 17, and we thought, “What’s the rush?” We wanted him to take the time to grow both spiritually and personally before stepping into the next season. Our search for a Christian discipleship program led us to Act Five. Inspired by Jon Berend’s vision and hope for Act Five, Jacob enrolled in the 2019 inaugural cohort. He was drawn to community living, the mission trip to Zambia, and a year of hiking and canoeing. In 2021, Ellie joined after witnessing the change in her older brother. Then, the following year, when Nathaniel was considering his next steps, he saw an opportunity for self-development and exciting adventures. While each child entered Act Five with different personalities, strengths, and challenges, all three left with a deeper appreciation for people and connection, more confidence in navigating life, and a stronger understanding of who they are in Christ and how God has uniquely gifted them.

4 Different Experiences

As parents, we hope for many things. At the top of the list is seeing our children
grow into men and women who walk with integrity, love, and grace, and whose lives
reflect a deep devotion to Christ. We pray they will know who they are and bravely live out their faith with conviction and purpose. To our utter disappointment (said with much humour), Act Five did not come with a parenting shortcut, nor was there any magic formula. Instead, it provided them with intentional opportunities to practice responsibility, serve others, think deeply about important questions, and mature through difficulty and encouragement.

Three different children entered 75 Blake Street. Three different experiences
unfolded, but one common thread emerged: a love of adventure, the joy of meaningful
relationships, and a growing desire to look beyond themselves and serve others. We
look back on our journey with Act Five with deep gratitude. The values we longed to instill in our children were not only reinforced but also beautifully reflected in the cultureand heart of the program. However, the impact of Act Five did not stop with the three children who attended. There is one more part of the story. Our fourth child, Abby, chose something different and decided that a gap year was not for her. Yet, in many ways, she still experienced it. She listened to her siblings tell stories from their many trips, share what they were learning, and talk about the highs and lows of community living. Through those stories and in everyday conversations, she caught glimpses of their values. While Abby never walked through the doors of 75 Blake Street, she was still shaped by what happened there.

The Impact of Act Five

As each child continues to grow into adulthood, still discovering their place in this world, we see the seeds that Act Five has planted. The lessons, habits, and experiences from their year have continued to take shape and nudge them forward. In a world full of competing voices and distractions, we notice small moments that show us what has stayed with them and continues to bear fruit. Each in their own way and at their own pace, we see our children invest in relationships and community. We see a willingness to pursue reconciliation, to stop and pay attention, to wonder and appreciate the beauty of God’s creation, and to sit with both the joy and the messiness of life while trusting that God is at work.

In many ways, the impact of Act Five has been quiet and small, yet deeply significant. It did not come in dramatic moments or instant transformation, but through ordinary moments accumulated over time. What started as a gap year for one became something that will forever be a part of our story.

Thank you for joining us in the learning of our community. We regularly publish new reflections and conversations. We’d love to have you continue the journey with us.

Keep Exploring

Learn More About Act Five

Discover Act Five’s Gap Year and Residency Programs, join our community events or learn more about our mission and vision.

Support Act Five

Act Five exists because of the generosity of people who believe in forming young adults for lives of purpose and service. Make a one-time gift or become a monthly supporter.

The post What’s The Rush? appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

Angela Reitsma Bick is a writer, speaker, and co-author of Blessed are the Undone: Testimonies of the Quiet Deconstruction of Faith in Canada (New Leaf, 2024). She teaches through the ICS’s Free to be Faithful program – dialogue-driven seminars that explore powerful themes of faith, deconstruction and hope in contemporary music and literature. In March 2026, Blessed are the Undone was released as an audiobook and is now available on more than 30 platforms. 

Angela was the fifth speaker in Act Five’s 2026 Winter Learning Series.

Bearing Witness

I was driving to church last week just slightly over the speed limit, and imagining the conversation I’d have with the police when I got pulled over. 

“No time to talk – sorry officer! I have to be at church for 10 a.m.!” 

“That’s no excuse. Plus, it’s not Sunday.” 

“I know. My friend is being . . . excommunicated, and I have to be there.”

Explaining excommunication would make me even more late, and it’s not really the right word for this scenario anyway – so that would be doubly frustrating. 

But sometimes you drive too fast on a Tuesday morning, and walk in after a regional church meeting has already started, and slide into the pew beside your friend and her husband just in time to hear the final stage of her departure as a pastor in this denomination get announced as an item on the agenda, like it’s no big deal. Though she had already been ordained as a minister in a different denomination, making this more or less a formality, still . . . there are good (and bad) ways to say good-bye. It actually was a big deal. A debate and then a vote were going to impact the wording (not to mention the experience) of her official departure. And I wanted to hear all of it, even though I had no influence or role to play, other than to bear witness.  

That’s why I was speeding. 

It would have been pretty hard to summarize to the police. 

And it’s also why I’ve started to think more about the places where language falls short.

It’s falling short in the denomination of my childhood and in my home church. It’s falling short in the conversations I’m having with friends and family, and in the ones I’m overhearing. There are membership classes and welcome cards for new people visiting church. What’s being offered to the people who are leaving? 

Exit Interviews

In 2021, I began a research project with Peter Schuurman that looked for patterns contributing to decades of church decline in Canada. We interviewed 28 Canadians who self-identified as having gone through the experience of faith deconstruction, which we defined as having your affiliation with God, the Bible and the Christian faith fall apart, usually prompted by failures of the Church, while simultaneously being distanced from your religious family, community and tradition. 

Our findings, published in Blessed are the Undone: Testimonies of the Quiet Deconstruction of Faith in Canada (New Leaf, 2024), did identify common themes in the experiences of Canadians going through faith deconstruction. But we added a second layer, which is that the stories of individuals deconstructing their faith are a prophetic call for the Church-with-a-capital-C to own up to its failures and seek restoration. Our book frames deconstruction as normative, arguing that people of faith are perpetually constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing various beliefs. Put simply, religion is a human activity lived out by regular people, trusting in God’s grace for the bits we get wrong. And – thank the Lord! — deconstruction isn’t the end of the story for a God who makes all things new.

Still, there are good (and bad) ways to say good-bye. “Cleaning up the membership list” is the closest thing I can think of to excommunication in my denomination; the phrase is shorthand for asking members with lapsed attendance to return or be deleted. There’s no easy category for hurt, questions, or concerns. I know that “excommunicate” has to do with communion, but I can’t help but hear in that word a kind of communication ban as well. Ex-member? No communication. Have you ever seen a good-bye package, round of applause or farewell prayer for departing members? When it comes to leave-taking, I wonder if even our theology falls short. And maybe naming that is a good place to start.

Sometimes you drive too fast on a Tuesday morning, and arrive a little late, and slide into the booth at a coffee shop where you’ve agreed to meet a friend. You don’t have an agenda or arguments lined up; you’re just going to say, “I haven’t seen you in a while. How are things going?”  

And you’ll stay to hear it all. 

Even if you have no influence or role to play, other than to bear witness. 

The post Where Language Falls Short – Angela Reitsma Bick appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson is a George MacDonald scholar who lives on a farm in the Ottawa Valley, Canada. She writes and lectures internationally on MacDonald, the Inklings, the 19th century, and Faith & the Arts. She is on the Advisory Board of Inklings Journal VII, a founding Board Member of the C.S. Lewis & Kindreds Society of Eastern & Central Europe, and co-chair of the George MacDonald Society. She directs Windstone Farm Linlathen, a non-profit that seeks to “cultivate community through Theology, Ecology, & the Arts.” Passionate about (re)integrating ecological care, local community, art, and academia, Kirstin (and WFL) occasionally partners with the environmental network of A Rocha. You can find some of her photography on Instagram: #Mythopoeic_Life

 

Kirstin was the third speaker in Act Five’s Winter Learning Series.

A Wise Imagination

“A wise imagination is the presence of the Spirit of God,” writes George MacDonald—the man C.S. Lewis called his “Master,” as both literary guide and spiritual mentor. He is also the man who, in 1873, responded to a petition from Hamiltonians and added this city to his renowned North American lecture tour.

It’s important to note that MacDonald writes here of a wise imagination. He knew well that the imagination can be lazy, flaccid, uninformed, selfish, or corrupt. And so he invites us to contemplate placing our imaginative abilities into participation with, and under the tutelage of, the Holy Spirit. And then, to anticipate what might thus unfold.

Re-Storied People

MacDonald thought deeply about imagination throughout his life. The only lecture he ever published and repeatedly delivered was a shortened version of his seminal essay, “The Imagination: Its Functions & Its Culture.” If you are familiar with Chesterton’s chapter “Ethics in Elfland” in Orthodoxy, Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Lewis’s essay “On Stories,” or even Barfield’s Poetic Diction, reading MacDonald’s essay can be startling. Many of the ideas later developed by these writers appear here first, in this essay and in the companion essay that follows it in A Dish of Orts: “Individual Development.”

MacDonald deeply believed that we are created in the image of an imaginative God. So the more deeply we are re-storied – as Christians are continually called and even commanded to be, from the Shema to Elijah, from Christ on the road to Emmaus to the countless faith-shaped voices who have followed – the healthier, more productive and more Christologically revolutionary our Imaginations will be. We are storied in and through our relationships with other humans, our communities and by the non-human creations of the Creator as well. 

As MacDonald writes:

“But while the imagination of man
has thus the divine function of putting thought into form,
it has a duty altogether human,
which is paramount to that function—
the duty, namely, which springs from his immediate relation to the Father,
that of following and finding out
the divine imagination in whose image it was made.
To do this,
the man must watch its signs, its manifestations.
He must contemplate what the Hebrew poets call
the works of His hands.”

MacDonald pushed back against the polarization of Reason from Imagination. To him, they were two sides of the same holy coin: inseparable, mutually dependent, and diminished when isolated from one another. “Poetry is true as Science, and Science is holy as Poetry,” he wrote as a lover of both. Through his entire work he demonstrates how each depends upon the other, and how an imbalance of either’s voice can be dangerous.

Always he is turning our attention back to the One who imagined both us and all of creation into existence:

“[The imagination is]
made in the image of the imagination of God.
Everything of man must have been of God first;
and it will help much towards our understanding of the imagination
and its functions in man
if we first succeed in regarding aright the imagination of God,
in which the imagination of man lives and moves and has its being.”

Compelling Goodness

Lewis, Chesterton, and many others observed that MacDonald possessed a rare gift: he could make Goodness deeply compelling. But MacDonald would argue that he can do this because he engages with the imaginative conversations – the stories and art – of the ‘Clouds of Witnesses’ in our history that have sought to these imaginative conversations. He brought  his own voice and experiences into that conversation, engaging in an antiphony of worship, and out of this, imaginatively new Goodnesses have been brought forth. 

When editing an anthology of such writers, MacDonald described himself as a “Master of the Hearing.” He wanted readers not merely to encounter individual voices, but to hear the beautiful antiphony that arises when lovers of God’s Story respond not only to the Gospel as found in the original texts, but respond to the responses, sounding out even more beautifully for the joint participation:

“No man could sing as he sung, had not others sung before him. Deep answereth unto deep, face to face, praise to praise. To the sound of the trumpet the harp returns its own vibrating response—alike but oh how different!”

Isn’t that invitationally stunning?

We can be in a chorus, should we choose, with all these glorious voices of old. To what might each of us give voice? What might we write, or sing, or paint, or tell, or do, if we were even more deeply storied? If we were even more immersed in relationship with the writings, and songs, and art of those who through the ages have sought themselves to better know God’s Truth, Goodness, and Beauty? 

George MacDonald was once well-loved by Hamiltonians. The Spectator archives alone are full of evidence of this, over the decades and well into the twentieth century. What would it look like for Hamiltonians today to also remember this chapter in the lives of their civic ancestors, to interweave the stories of then with the stories of before and thus sing a new song, in wise imagination, for the Hamilton of today? 

Thanks for reading. 

We hope you’ll continue following the conversations shaping life at Act Five. New reflections and stories are published regularly, and we’ll be sharing more reflections from this year’s Winter Learning Series speakers in the weeks ahead.

Keep Exploring!

Learn more about act five

Discover Act Five’s Gap Year and Residency Programs, join our community events or learn more about our mission and vision.

Support Act Five

Act Five exists because of the generosity of people who believe in forming young adults for lives of purpose and service. Make a one-time gift or become a monthly supporter.

The post Clouds of Witnesses – Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

During second semester the students have the opportunity to participate in a placement  in a field that they could see themselves pursuing after Act Five. As part of Kassia’s placement, we took on an artistic project remembering the home as it was before the summer’s renovations.  

In our initial conversation, ideas erupted and we couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with the inspiration we had to catalogue the home. We landed on the idea of eight different pieces, each representing a different room in the home. We worked in mixed media, running around with plasticine to make prints of cool textures, used real popcorn and cooked spaghetti to make marks, and referenced pieces of literature, poetry and prayers that have been significant in the home over the years.

One thing I learned over my time working with and supervising Kassia on this project was that 75 Blake Street had really become my home. I knew the essence of the spaces and what happened in them, I knew the prayers and the liturgies by heart and I got to spend time thinking about where I fit in the story of the home as I thought to capture it through Art. I knew this home and I knew my place.

A quote that Act Five often refers to is this; “we cannot love what we do not know and we cannot know what we do not experience.” As I looked at the eight pieces hanging on the wall when we were finally done, it was clear to me that being immersed in this place has truly shaped me to love it.

There is real pain in pulling up the roots that have grown over the last season of my life, yet I’m left wondering what this longing means for where I go next. As I head to teachers college in September, with the goal of teaching high school Art and English, I realize that my next place needs to look different. I am so grateful and I have been so deeply blessed in this season of Act Five, and at the same time I know that it cannot last forever, it shouldn’t last forever. Hope grows in the “deathy stuff”. Sounds dramatic, but it feels true. The pain I feel over leaving sparks in me a longing to know my next place.

In giving myself to this work, I have been molded into someone who longs to be where my feet are. I used to long for the big adventures in life, yet as I sit with myself in this transition, my longings have shifted more towards simplicity. I leantowards rhythms of prayer, and walking in my neighbourhood. I’ve learned to be curious about the names of the trees that line the sidewalk and my backyard. I’ve been shaped to want to know where I am.

 My prayer as my time with Act Five comes to a close is that whatever neighbourhood and home I end up in next, that it would be a place I come to know deeply and in turn, come to love deeply too. 

The post Where My Feet Are – Jana Arnold appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

“What do you think young people need most?”

• Cullen: Challenge. Challenge requires that proper support for such a challenge is in place, but ultimately challenge and people who support you. 
• Jana: They need a safe place to ask questions, to be seen, and to be asked good questions for learning that is their own. 

Having two resident leaders with different perspectives on what young people need most could seem opposing, but instead it created a culture inside the Act Five House that felt dynamic. Neither of us were wrong, but we also didn’t have a full view. We needed each other’s perspective to create an environment that allowed room for real people and a plethora of needs.

Throughout this year we have been shown some of the most authentic ways of what it means to be human through our students. 

In March it became clear that there was tension amongst the girls . Living so closely together in one room, combined with the stress of assignments and a desire not to say or do anything that might hurt each other was creating a tense environment. Their longing was to live together well and to care for each other, and yet they each were feeling the strain. What often happens in community settings was happening – they began living into a belief that if they just didn’t talk about the problems, the problems wouldn’t exist. While observing these dynamics we decided that challenging them to have a conversation was the way forward. Sitting on the floor at Benediction church, the atmosphere started out thick and uncomfortable, knowing that this was not what they wanted to be doing. Yet as I (Jana) gave them the challenge that only they could choose a way through this and that they could face it or keep living the way they were, they did choose the way through. They shared where they were each at, they acknowledged their differing needs, there was an apology offered and grace extended. This was an example of a moment that called for the hard thing to be done, and the fruit of facing that challenge allowed the girls to be able to continue their year together, with clarity and the ability to see each other through. 

Through pursuing challenges and being challenged by others, we are given opportunities to see pieces of ourselves that are most raw, and perhaps often hidden. And in those challenges we can be formed by seeing those honest, hidden and raw pieces. Not hiding them, not reframing them. We grow resiliency and self confidence and we learn to recognize that we do not need to be afraid of hard things. And when we do so in community, we can celebrate that journey together.

By our second week living at Blake Street it had become apparent that not everyone knew how to do laundry. We had told the students where the laundry machine was and that they would need to get their own soap, and this had left them with the challenge to be in charge of their own laundry routines. This was one of those moments however where a challenge failed us and quickly we realized that we would need to have some conversations about how often laundry was done, how much soap to use, and how to use a laundry machine. It meant we would have to let students know that we see their fears of trying something new, of messing up in front of a group of people they had just met, of being corrected, or of proving oneself incapable in front of a new group and having to worry about their belonging to that group. After we could properly see people we could then choose a course of action, some embarrassing stories of how we got it wrong, showing the group as a whole how to do something that in honesty was new to a few, and keep the environment considerate and compassionate. 

Through seeing others and giving them a safe space and room for vulnerability, empathy from others, grace for their incompleteness, celebration for their accomplishments, and the ability to celebrate another’s worth not even when it didn’t matter all that much to our own benefit. 

As we have led these young people this year we’ve discovered that support and challenge is not just what young people need, but in fact what we all need. We all crave a place to belong, we all face challenges and seek to find purpose. We all want to be seen and we want to take pride in the identity we have. As we leave this year the hope has always been that our students would feel prepared to live into the real world rooted in their relationship in Christ and in the places where they will go next. What we didn’t realize was how much we were also being formed, how much we too were seen and challenged and asked questions and forced to see other perspectives. So, to our students from this past year, we hope you leave pursuing challenges and wanting to be cherished and we hope you know that so many of us are after this very same thing.

The post What Do You Think Young People Need Most? appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

Staff member & trip leader Arissa shares experiences gained and lessons learned during the cross-cultural service learning trip she and the Gap Year Program took to El Salvador back in January.

Listening

“You will sing the first verse in English, then we will sing the second verse in Spanish, then we will all sing the chorus together.” Our translator, Delaney, relays this to us as we sit in the common space of Casa Semillas. We are about to open our day with a devotional. It’s awkward. We sing the song too fast, our Salvadoran friends sing the song too slow, but somehow it blends together into harmonized worship. As we reach the chorus we begin to find an understanding of how to balance our two languages and as we sing “This is Amazing Grace” together. What begins as confusion ends in laughter as we connect over our shared commitment to God. The joy of those connections defeats the awkwardness of the language and cultural barriers. After all, we’re all just people longing for connection. 

Casa Semillas is the office of the organization, Semillas de Nueva Creación (Seeds of a New Creation). They were our hosts as we explored the culture, history and ways of life in El Salvador. We spent three weeks in January learning both about El Salvador as a country, and about the ways that “Semillas” are working as the physical hands and feet of God in El Salvador. Our 21 days with them served as a refreshing reminder of the ways that we can live out our missional purposes in this world. 

Learning

We learned how to make organic fertilizer and pesticides, and how these organic mixes are taught to rural communities. They replace the expensive chemical options that have also been causing kidney and liver diseases in the farmers who use them. Semillas showed us the gardens that they are busy helping schools and churches create. These gardens are a way to meet the food and nutrition needs in communities while empowering them at the same time. We met a man who teaches kids to breakdance and paint artful graffiti as his ministry to them. He teaches these things so that the kids know that whatever their interests are, God has a place for them. We met other children’s clubs and churches who play games and teach children about God so that they can be a part of a family that they might have otherwise lost to gang violence or prison. All throughout the country, we were introduced to the creative ways that the Church in El Salvador is making space for people from all walks of life. And, we were reminded that our role here in Hamilton is to do the same. Because, after all, in the words of our translator, “service and learning trips like this are great, but if we don’t also let them impact our own lives long-term and within our own context, we are doing something wrong.”

“We were introduced to the creative ways that the Church in El Salvador is making space for people from all walks of life, and were reminded that our role here in Hamilton is to do the same.”

Growing

As we spent our last few nights in El Salvador debriefing our trip, Act Five students were given the opportunity to create goals for back home that reflected what they had learned in El Salvador. Just recently, we received a host survey back from El Salvador, where Delaney, our translator, reflected on how impactful listening to the goals of the students was. She wrote:

“I was truly touched listening to how each student was impacted in such unique, personal, and profound ways. One student who struggled with social anxiety on the trip set a goal for herself of having at least one deep conversation per month with someone she does not know well yet. Another was excited to go home and start volunteering at an organization like Big Brother Big Sister – one that focuses on building relationships and healing and transforming people (like Semillas does), rather than just giving free handouts. Another was struck by the hospitality she experienced and wanted to bring that gift back to Canada to improve community outreach efforts with more intentionality within the Act Five program and at home. Although these students were so young, it brought tears to my eyes to see how much wisdom, conviction, and passion each of them have, and it was a privilege to know that their time in El Salvador will have a lasting impact not just on their lives but on their families, friends, and communities as well.”

Gratitude

So, to all you who have supported us on this trip in prayer or donations or any other way, we are grateful. Thank you for your help in allowing this impactful trip to happen. When you see this group of students, ask them about their experience in El Salvador. Ask what happened in them on this trip, so that their stories may not only impact themselves, but you as well.

______________________________________

Act Five facilitates service-learning trips in for young adults in partnership with Resonate Global Mission and World Renew Disaster Response Services. This trip to El Salvador with Seeds of a New Creation was in partnership with Resonate, who supports the work of Christian organizations doing local missions around the world. To help make future trips possible, visit https://actfive.ca/give/. We are grateful for your support.

The post Listening, Learning, and Growing in El Salvador appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.

In January, a small group of Act Five staff, students, and residents visited Thunder Bay in partnership with Living Hope Native Ministries. In this blog post, Cullen, one of the trip participants and an Act Five Resident, reflects on his experience of the trip.

The first thing that hit me was the cold brisk air, next the expanse of white that covers tree, hill and land as far as the eye can see. The sun rises late and sets early, and people hiding in the warmth of their home are scarce to be seen. The lake to the side carries a mysterious aura of power and the uninhabited mountains far in front remind you that this is a frontier, a land that has not been fully tamed and which deserves both respect and an attitude of caution. The streets are indentured to weather as are the houses, typically made to simply give cost effective shelter. But of course, as it always is, the full story is more dynamic and more nuanced than one description can carry. 

One takeaway that I had from this trip is that Thunder Bay is a place of unfamiliar stories that resonate across space. We all have our own individual stories of pain, and although the idea of pain is something that resonates in us, the stories of pain that I heard were unfamiliar. Through experiences of talking with residential school survivors, meeting with an indigenous couple who were deeply involved in caring for the community, and receiving background information from an aspiring politician as well as from our guide I got a taste of what the real Thunder Bay was. There were stories of abuse, trauma, the various ways people ran from their pain, separation of groups of people, blatant discrimination, deep hurt, and separation from government, particularly among Indigenous communities. Yet themes of people seeking out similarly minded people, finding safety in solitude, and division between different groups of people were deeply transparent to me.

I observed that Thunder Bay was also a place lost in time but worthy of value. The values are much more catered towards a community mentality rather than an individualist approach. People, even people that have hurt you, are precious and worth getting hurt for, and simplicity seems essential to live in the present and hold the past in hopes of not getting buried by it. Indirectness, burying certain pains under the table, and being practised in listening were all values I was shocked to witness and gave me a slight sense of unease due to their differences from my own. Due to its location both as a place separated from the rest of civilization and as a place facing the wilderness and engaged in long discussions about how to share the land between different groups of people there was a slowness to change and a separation from southern Ontario culture.

In this, however, beautiful things were found, such as a profound acceptance for people despite wrongs they’ve committed. There was a strong desire for healing which comes from knowing brokenness. And in corners, it could be seen that there was a longing for God as He was the only one powerful enough to create good. From my brief window into this new world, the good and bad seemed to be easily found in the extremes. In my experience, when one can come to terms with the extremes they can be a light to the world around them and easily point to the value which often lies misunderstood to outside eyes. From conversations we had it was clear there were people who deeply had felt this and deeply valued their community as a result and made their place, their people, and their land deeply worthy of value.

My last observation, and the most important one for me personally, was that Thunder Bay was a different world, with the same God. I’ve briefly pointed to the pains, the lifestyle differences, and left some parts out to keep an air of confusion – as confusion is a key part of my interpretation. A truth echoed by an Indigenous man we met who rehabilitates bears and carries the weight of an old culture meeting a new, a truth shared by a ministry program leader who has created a safe space for Indigenous teenagers to come from the North and in their struggles to adapt to culture shock and distance from community, a truth shared by a woman who told a story of abuse and healing, a truth shared by a parents desperate to see their kids see a better a future is this; we need God, a God we can trust to be stronger than what we face, a God who is understanding of our personal story and a God who will love us wherever we are at.

I had the opportunity to see a corner of Canada, one that did not represent well the Canada I’ve come to know and in that I got to see a church who, with a sense of desperation, worshipped God, called out their prayer requests to the pastor during the service and deeply appreciated the simplicity and the promise of hope given from the Bible. 

This trip was deeply impactful and came with many fun opportunities; northern hikes, spending time with a bear cub, sledding adventures and all the other thrills which come with exploring a new place. It was a chance to spend some time with new people, in a new place, and hear new stories. And, I got to embrace an adventure rooted in many values central to Act Five.

The post Thunder Bay Vision Experience appeared first on Act Five: Community Initiatives for Young Adults.