NOTE: College student Michelle Ryan has served for a few years as a collegiate intern with Missouri Disaster Relief (MODR).
With the devastating scale of this year’s hurricane destruction filling the news, human efforts to help can feel futile. That feeling of despair and the inability to do something eventually gives way to a much more tolerable feeling of apathy, which I believe characterizes the attitudes of many college students like me.
After all, what control do we have over such a disaster when our own lives are so heavily dictated by our grades and work schedules? Fortunately, I found I could make a difference. For the past two summers, I’ve had the pleasure of serving as a student intern for Missouri Disaster Relief’s collegiate team. While this ministry has helped hundreds of people throughout the country, I felt that it was I who was tremendously blessed through my encounters with other volunteers and those who received our aid.
What Missouri Baptist Disaster Relief has taught me is that my own insignificance is an illusion and, God willing, my efforts can have a big impact. As I receive emailed updates from disaster relief teams hard at work on the east coast and beyond, I am simultaneously thankful for their work and reminded of my experiences with MODR.
As a post-pandemic college freshman in 2022, I applied for this internship out of a feeling of helplessness toward the world and toward my own trajectory in life. It is no exaggeration to say that I experienced a turning point when I arrived at the Readiness Center for training in chainsaw, mass feeding and flood recovery, among other things.
Doing ‘hard’ things
I experienced a lot of personal growth that first summer as I was pushed to try new things, some of those new things — like insulating a home’s crawl space in June — were hard! I especially found it challenging when I was put in leadership positions.
Over the course of the internship, every student has the opportunity to be ‘Blue Hat for a Day’ and take the lead on the day’s job sites. The first time I was the job site’s ‘Blue Hat,’ I felt very incompetent and unsure of my own decision making. I had to learn confidence as well as how to ask my peers for input to come to the best decisions.
I not only grew as a leader, but I also developed deep friendships with the other interns, as well as with other volunteers we met on our travels. Over the past two years, those deployments have taken us to Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, New Mexico and the breadth of our home state. Something that a friend and I took delight in was finding other volunteers at our callouts who loved overalls as much as we did and coordinating with them!
My second year with the internship particularly revealed to me the power of showing Christ through action. Whether we provide a little or a lot for a person, it is the attitude of love we served with that they will remember. Listening to the stories affected by natural disasters made me realize that my efforts do matter, and disaster relief is one way that I can live out the mandate to love my neighbor.
I am thankful to have learned so much from MODR and I hope many more college students can benefit from the way the collegiate team and MODR as a whole exemplifies Christ’s love through service. MODR volunteers do what they do because they love people and believe them worthy of care because they have been made in God’s image.
We can love others because our Savior first loved us and that is a truth that can never be shaken, no matter how strong the storms are — not even Hurricane Helene can damage it.
Interested?
For college students looking for a ministry opportunity, college credit or an adventure, MODR’s collegiate team is a 10-week program that provides training in chainsaw, flood recovery, mass care and heavy equipment, as well as training in other areas of disaster relief depending on the need.
This is a paid internship that covers housing, meals, transportation and training; and over the course of the summer, interns will grow as leaders, communicators and critical thinkers.
Applications for the 2025 program are open and will close April 1, 2025. To apply, visit https://modr.org/dr-internships/.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Michelle Ryan and originally published by the Pathway.
