IT HAPPENS TO just about all of us who, in our early adulthood, commit ourselves to a life of globally conscious idealism. We run off to join a cause, maybe commit to a volunteer project for a year or two, come home, and find ourselves overwhelmed by how to create lasting change in a broken world.
Christian writers Jim and Linda Hunt struggled with this question in 1998, not so much as young people but as middle-age adults, after their daughter Krista perished in an accident in Bolivia. Krista and her husband Aaron were three years into their marriage and six months into a three-year service project teaching literacy and microenterprise with the Mennonite Central Committee, when the bus they were in plunged off a ravine.
In 1999, the Hunts decided to create the kind of soul-searching community they would have desired for Krista and Aaron’s post-volunteer experience, by founding the Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship, a program to support young volunteers during their service and the first few years of life transitions that follow. In 2001, in the still-gaping hole of Krista’s absence, in the same backyard where she once played and cared for pigmy goats and a horse in the barn, Jim and Linda built a cozy, globally inspired retreat center called the Hearth. They wanted to bring Krista’s spirit home to comfort the weary minds of returning service learners.
Linda Hunt’s new book, Soul Space: Creating Places and Lives that Make a Difference, is a reflection on that experience, one she hopes will help people who want to foster a commitment to lifelong community service in the young people they mentor. Adorned with poetry, recipes, and photos of the young adults who talked, slept, laughed, cooked, and made music at the Hearth, the book’s pages are as beautiful as its stories.
Soul Space is a valuable read for anyone wondering how to keep the spark of global service burning. The book highlights the work of young people participating in everything from microfinance projects in the new African economy to the mentoring of homeless youth in the United States’ most forgotten pockets of poverty and structural racism. It also recounts how the Hearth has served as a place for wedding and baby celebrations, extended international family reunions, and lifelong friendships across diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and manifestations of the Christian faith. Soul Space is a beautiful blueprint for contemplation among Christians who believe that true faith requires an enduring dedication to justice around the world.
Julienne Gage was longtime friends with Krista Hunt Ausland.
Julienne Gage is a Miami-based journalist who investigates economic development in the U.S. and Caribbean.
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