Over fall break, I was blessed to participate in an Appalachia Seminar through the Center for Social Concerns and spend a week at Nazareth Farm, located in rural West Virginia. While living and working with over 40 other college students from Notre Dame and several other schools, I learned the priceless nature of simply showering, how to exterminate wasps while holding extension ladders steady, and the importance of having a power drill set in forward instead of reverse, along with myriad other lessons. It may look like the classic story of your typical sheltered suburban girl going on an adventure in the great outdoors. From the outside, it was just about avoiding any egregious construction mistakes or highly dangerous mishaps with power tools and having a grand old time with classmates temporarily free from the stress of classes, meetings, and exams.

Digging a little deeper past all these cherished memories and reflecting on the lives of the staff at Nazareth Farm and the homeowners with whom we worked, I came face-to-face with some of the most authentic models of mercy I’ve ever met. The Farm revolves around four main cornerstones of community, simplicity, prayer, and service and provides home repair to the surrounding region in the spirit of these cornerstones. Each member of the Nazareth Farm staff left something behind to bring his or her unique message of mercy to Appalachia. Whether it was foregoing what society would deem a successful post-college career or facing a less-than-supportive family, they took the proverbial road less traveled to find a new home serving in West Virginia.

So often, I think of my vocation as just that—my vocation—and fail to consider how God wants to work through me. However, one of my favorite priests here on campus, Father Pat Reidy, once described vocation as Jesus calling us out of ourselves.

Pope Francis sums up the need for an outward-looking vocation: “The Christian vocation is first and foremost a call to love, a love which attracts us and draws us out of ourselves, ‘de-centering’ us and triggering an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.”

It is so easy to approach a call to service focused on what I am sacrificing and what I have to give, remaining merely a spectator of mercy. The staff at the Farm combat this inclination and are able to live as instruments of mercy because of their radical openness. They welcome their “Community Friends” to the Farm several times a year for dinner, fellowship, and prayer. Some of the friends were Hazel, the sweet grandma who loved to talk about her grandkids and finding festive Halloween shirts for 50 cents; and Grover, who energetically encouraged every person he talked with to preach the Gospel to the whole world. This expression of hospitality and looking outward is quite rare in society today.

Whenever staff members talk about the homeowners, their faces immediately light up while describing quirks and stories about the residents. They recount a homeowner’s love of cats, steady trust in God, witty comebacks, and zeal for life—not that same individual’s unemployment, lack of running water or proper sanitation in their home, or handicaps. They affirm the inherent dignity of the homeowners and see them as not just another poverty statistic, but a person with a story and gifts to share. This is a more subtle but striking expression of mercy.

Examples of mercy abound: the Blessed Mother, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Saint Mother Teresa, and the Little Sisters of the Poor, just to name a few. With all these “mercy heavyweights” in mind, I often find myself questioning what I as an overworked, overcommitted college student can do to spread mercy. Then I remember Nazareth Farm and the simple but beautiful mercy of hospitality present there. We may not be able to travel to Calcutta or even Appalachia in between reading assignments and lab reports, but we can listen and console a stressed friend. We cannot repair roofs and install underpinning on mobile homes every day, but we can mend a single wounded heart with a smile across the quad or quick affirmation.

Pope Francis addresses the challenge we face as young people trying to live in the world without being of the world saying, “At times uncertainty, worries about the future and the problems they daily encounter can risk paralyzing their youthful enthusiasm and shattering their dreams, to the point where they can think that it is not worth the effort to get involved … Dear young friends, never be afraid to go out from yourselves and begin the journey!”

Mackenzie Kraker is a sophomore studying chemical engineering with a theology minor. While at Nazareth Farm, she was thrilled to learn how to use a weed wacker and was not very merciful to unwanted plant growth. Should you have lawns needing some energetic weed wacking contact her at mkraker@nd.edu.