Trusting the Unknown

Trusting the Unknown: An Interview with Jenn Merrimont

By Lauren Campbell

1: “...take hold of the life that is truly life,” 1 Timothy 6:19

When acquaintances ask me what I want to do after college, I freeze. It seems like a test. My desire is to be defined by who I am now, or rather, perceived on the merits of how I actively try to live a relationally focused, intentional life of purpose. In other words, I am more focused on how I want to be than what I want to do. It is best to take it day-by-day—to live a life based on needs, not wants. When we are more focused on what we want, I’ve realized that we are in less of a hurry and are, therefore, more likely to look around and see the needs of others. 

I do not know many people who live like this, myself included. Recently, however, I had the most fortunate pleasure of encountering 23-year-old Jenn Merrimont in Seattle, Washington. She serves on the part-time staff for a ministry called Praying Pelican. Jenn spends most nights sleeping on air mattresses after a long day leading service groups, building deep relationships with the people she leads, cooking meals, and leading Bible-based debriefs and small groups in the evening. When she’s not doing that, she is in Minnesota teaching English as a second language and babysitting. Jenn lives deliberately—and she deeply delights in the flourishing of other people. There is a joy in her that is sourced from a dimension far richer than the broken one we all inhabit. I have plenty to learn from Jenn and from the life practices she implements.

2: “...to live deliberately” - Walden, Henry David Thoreau

Over spring break of 2023, I decided to go to Seattle on a service-based trip with Belmont University Ministries (Belmont on Mission) in partnership with Praying Pelican Ministries. I did not know what to expect—experientially or emotionally. By the following Saturday, I left Washington State with something new occupying my thoughts. There was a sort of unspeakable beauty in every encounter I had—something so precious and spiritually rich that my words cannot capture and my hands cannot hold it. Everything seemed immediately vital to me. Understanding the hearts of those directly before me became the most important use of my brain power. As a result, I was not preoccupied with anything other than the day's needs and how I could use my health to better the people and environment I served. And there, in the center of the chaos, are people like Jenn who position themselves as a champion for other people. I wanted to follow her lead.

I called Jenn on April 9—exactly one month after I last saw her. She eagerly agreed to connect with me via Zoom. We needed to meet at 8 pm because she was leading a trip in Port Charlotte, Florida. I knew what her day must have entailed before 8 pm:

1) Less than eight hours of sleep

2) A 6 am wake-up call to make breakfast

3) A long day of manual labor in the humid Florida air.

4) Non-stop questions that needed answers

5) People to meet and care for and get to know

6)…And at the bottom of all of that, profound exhaustion from a day well-lived. 

Still, she agreed to an hour-long phone call with me, a girl she met almost a month ago—a girl hundreds of miles away from the immediacy of her current environment.

When Jenn answered the call, a wide smile spread on our faces. I was so happy to see her. After we exchanged greetings and salutations, I noticed the almost industrial background. “Where are you?” I blurted.

“Oh, a supply closet!” she replied with an enthusiastic smile. “We are at a church called Winter Garden Presbyterian in Port Charlotte, Florida. We are sleeping in a supply closet this week!” Then, she flipped the camera so I could meet her co-trip leader. We all laughed loudly. It all seemed so blissfully ridiculous to think about all the places we never expected to end up and the unexpected joy we can encounter in the humblest places. It seemed like no one in the world had ever been so radiant about lounging in a closet.

“So, Jenn,” I asked. “What have you been up to since our time in Seattle?”

She inhaled, then exhaled the words: “So since then, I went home back to Minnesota for a week. Then, I spent two weeks in Hawaii. One week was in Kikkawa, on the southwest side of Kawaii. Then, one week in the Hui which is on like the in the midwest of Gwy. I went home to Minnesota for another week. And then I came here to Port Charlotte…Whoa, yeah.”

Whoa was precisely what I was thinking. Externally, I was quiet for a beat longer than considered normal. Internally, my head was racing. Strangely enough, I thought of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. There is a scene where Nick is thrust into the glittering, fast-paced world of New York society, and in the swishing of the glamour and vice, he pauses. He looks out the window and introspectively ponders the following: “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” (Fitzgerald).

3: “...the inexhaustible variety of life,” - The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

In this scene, Nick is contemplating the conscious expenditure of his morality. In other words, how he’s selling out. He’s throwing caution to the wind. He’s giving into the vice that sucks his soul dry like the liquor that seduces him. In English class, they call this phenomenon “moral bankruptcy.” The key is in the twist of meaning, stealing a word from the finance lexicon. This word bankruptcy. Its sound has a sharpness to it. It should not belong in the canon of words used to describe the human condition. Yet, there it is—stark, rude, and unapologetically invasive to the modern-day experience. Still, societies have not purged it from our lexicon because there is a need for it to remain. The term is in circulation because it carries a load of emotional baggage. Simply put, it is true. So, so true. Time and love, like money, are things we spend.

What will I spend my time on?

In one month, I had squandered my time away on hasty distractions, hurrying toward unlikely opportunities that turned out to be dead ends, isolating myself from kind and patient friends, and making bad grades in school. 

Meanwhile, Jenn had planted countless seeds across America. She visited four different states, one of them Hawaii. She must have encountered so many people, joined the trajectories of thousands of stories…I yearn deeply for such a chance. To make my life an adventure, to defy the odds, and jump through the eye of a needle. If only, if only…I could thread together my haphazard desires and unite them into some cohesive form of protection…I could weave the unfamiliarities of my life into a beautiful tapestry…Despite all the imperfections, I could transform rags into something beautiful so that every trajectory of life’s possible outcomes could be braided together. If only, if only…I could see the pattern and know.

4: “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing,” - Socrates

Of course, it has come to my attention that I have limits of all kinds. So does Jenn, and so does everyone.

Once my trains of thought collided, I came to. I rejoined the conversation, put away my sleepish expression, and posed a new one full of excitement. 

Regarding Jenn’s jam-packed schedule, I asked her: “Is that fun, exhausting, tiring? How would you describe that?”

Her response: “It is definitely all of the above. Especially when doing part-time missions like this where you're back and forth. Everything else in your life keeps moving. So it can be kind of difficult to be back and forth. And trying to stay present in different places. And then, obviously, the traveling…it can be draining. But it is so good.”

Everything else in your life keeps moving.

It is difficult to be back and forth…trying to stay present in different places.

Oh, no.

Those inexhaustible varieties of life creep in.

“I was within and without.”

Within what? Without what?

You can’t be present in two places at once, of course. I can’t even stay present in my natural environment when my phone is in my hand. So, how will I be able to handle life away from home? Do I know where home is? And down and down the spiral of worry goes.

I did not know how to respond to Jenn’s comment with a thought-provoking question because I was not seeing her. I only saw myself in the space between her words. So, instead, I do what any human does when their brain stops functioning: I talked about myself.

I told her how I applied to be a part-time staff member at Praying Pelican, but they immediately rejected me because I had no summer 2023 availability. I told her my plan now is to apply next year, once I graduate from Belmont. I’ll try to work for Praying Pelican Ministries then, you know, when I’m older.

Until then, though, I applied to be a trip leader for University Ministries. Of course, there’s a but: I have not been accepted yet.

I had this plan. This big ordeal I conspired in my head during classroom daydreaming and the space between sleep and waking. It’s un-reality. It’s make-believe glory days. Deep down, I know that it is not my reality—yet…

“Jenn, how did you, I don’t know…I guess, fall into working in part-time mission ministry?”

“That is a really good question,” she began. “No, short answer. I had no idea that this is where I would be. Not only just in this season of life…but ever. I never imagined that I would be doing missions at all.”

Again, whoa. “Never?” I wondered aloud.

“Yes. I’m not sure where to start because it was kind of like a series of miracles that brought me to ministry…”

From there, Jenn told me her testimony for the next ten minutes or so. I sat quietly in my dorm room as she told me her life story, with no rebuff or hold back. 

In fiction writing, we have language for the hopeless moments in a hero’s story. Bad guys close in. Dark night of the soul. ‘All is lost’ moment…Jenn’s story checks off all the beats and then some. Real life is not so linear, though, and the force of hope is far too expansive to be contained in marginalia alone. Jenn continued: 

“It was like, nine months ago, I was in the hospital, and I prayed, and I asked God to please give me a future outside of the hospital, and please use me. And every single one of you, all of the members on our Seattle team, were a part of God's fulfillment of His promises in my life. it was just a complete takeover of my life from God [...] he filled me in a way that I would never have expected or planned or chosen for myself [...] It was really just kind of a part of God's plan in healing and restoring my life and giving me a purpose [...] So yeah. It was really…it was just really cool. I don't know a better word for that.”

5: “...plans to give you hope and a future,” Jeremiah 29:11

Jenn’s story could not have happened without Hope and Trust. Hope that it will all work out better than she could ever conspire it to be, and Trust that she would be guided to solid ground. It is written in Jeremiah 29:11, “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you Hope and a future.’”

We paused for a moment. I looked at a smiling Jenn, hanging out in her supply closet bedroom, and she was looking at me hanging out in my Nashville, Tennessee dorm room—and I imagine we both felt gratitude. Sure, we had not seen each other in a month. Perhaps I will never see Jenn in person again. I do not know. I don’t know. And maybe, just maybe, that is the most significant gift that God could give me.

“That's incredible,” I exhaled. “Yeah… I want to use your word. Cool. That's really, really, really cool!”

Laughter bubbled up, and we let out a sigh of relief because Jenn’s past is a story—one true and sincere, with periods at the end of every sentence. We look up, and we look forward. We hope. We trust.

We wear ourselves out with joy. “It is cool, Right?” Jenn says.

“Yeah,” I agree. “It really, really is.”

Otter Voice Meeting Notes, 2023, https://otter.ai/u/q6bMc7fQQcBv9I61hKLTzPAGEiQ?utm_source=copy_url. 

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby, Scribner, New York, New York, 1925. Print.

Niv Study Bible. Zondervan, Barker, Kenneth L. 2020. Print.

Plato, and St George Stock. The Apology of Plato. BiblioLife, 2010. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. Waldren, Simon & Schuster, New York, New York, 1854. Print.