A letter from Pastor Don Mason, First Presbyterian Church, Urbana Ill.

Dear Friends,

“Minimize your expectations, and celebrate the surprises!” we say to each other when we embark on a mission trip to Malawi. We’re not sure what will happen next, but it often produces something even better than we had imagined.

The women of the Korean/American Bible Study group prepare beef stew. Photo courtesy of First Presbyterian Church, Urbana, Illinois.

God works in mysterious ways, and the first week of Easter brought a bundle of surprises to our church and community and the national effort for fairness for farm workers. For me, it started when I sat down in my office after the “Hallelujah Chorus” was over, the trumpets had been packed and taken home and the last lily had been distributed. I was tired after a full Holy Week experience, including a sunrise service earlier that same day.

Almost ready to leave for dinner with some friends, I noticed a light blinking on my phone, indicating a message had been left. The message asked me to call Brent Purdue, the logistics coordinator of the McDonald’s Truth Tour for Fair Food, including 70 Immokalee farm workers from Florida who would be hosted in our church for dinner, lodging, and breakfast on the Monday and Tuesday following Easter Sunday. Wondering what new details about parking for the tour bus or the public appearances on campus he might want to discuss, I decided to call him back now instead of later.

Brent informed me, quite apologetically, that an “unforeseen development,” including things “out of our control,” had led to a change in plans for the trip to Urbana. It apparently involved something rather delicate with McDonald’s, but it needed to be confidential for the moment. “We will not be coming to Urbana,” he stated.

Images of Bea Strozak filling the church refrigerator with 24 dozen eggs and many packages of frozen potatoes for the breakfast filled my mind. I recalled Beverly Martin and Donna Mason returning from Sam’s with fresh cuts of beef, sacks of vegetables, three cases of bottled water, salsa, Tabasco sauce, napkins, and other items. I remembered people preparing corn bread and cookies in their homes, David Bullock and Eva Steger translating table prayers into Spanish, and Steve Johnson calculating how many sleeping bags would fit in each carpeted room when the furniture was removed. I thought about David Kay purchasing leafy greens and other veggies for a monster salad to feed 90.

After a moment of reflection, I told Brent not to worry about us. Our hope and prayer, I suggested, is that something good would come out of this for the farm workers. What I didn’t realize fully at the time is that something very good for us would also come out of this – something that I could only interpret as a sign of Easter joy!

Over the next 24 hours, the volunteers rallied to make good use of these resources we had gathered for one purpose and now sought to use in other ways. The women of the Korean/American Bible Study group, which meets every Wednesday, had offered to prepare the stew, and they were not deterred. Camille Caldwell, Je Un Kim, Donna Mason, Sunghee Paek, Ann Ricker, Soo Young, and Carol Underwood (affectionately referred to by Ann as the “Stew Crew”) spent the morning on Monday preparing meat and cutting up onions, celery, carrots, and potatoes to fill three very large rectangular pots and placing them in the church ovens. We called our local church partners to determine that the TIMES Center men’s shelter could make immediate good use of all the food we had gathered.

At the end of the day, David Kay, chair of our Mission Department, and Donna Mason delivered the stew and other items to the TIMES Center just in time for some 80 residents to experience an unexpected feast. One veteran cook there said it was the first time in her memory that beef stew had been served at the Center.

When word came from Louisville on Monday that McDonald’s, its suppliers, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers had all gathered at the Carter Center in Atlanta, we celebrated an Easter victory of several dimensions. After two years of discussions, an historic agreement scalable to the whole food industry had been achieved bringing hundreds of farm workers closer to a living wage and a new code of conduct for all involved in the process. After only a few weeks of preparation, we had deepened our partnership with local mission partners at the TIMES Center, facilitated an unexpected feast, and enjoyed cross-cultural fellowship with Korean/Americans and those in our church who speak Spanish. The combined impact was evidence of new life, signs of peace and justice for more of God’s children, and Easter joy.

Grace and peace,
Pastor Don Mason, First Presbyterian Church, Urbana Ill.