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Person-to-person encounters

This is where God’s Beloved has promised to show up.

Christa Orfitelli possesses an avid sense of adventure. Her quest for meaningful work has taken her to a serving year among the home-bound elderly in New York City, into therapeutic story-sharing in Australia, to church mission trips, and to behavioral health work in the Quad Cities.

As time goes on, Christa realizes something about the adventure of the discipled life. It’s all about the daily encounters, the ordinary moments, the opportunities to care about other human beings.

“When I think about discipleship,” says Christa, “I think about relationships, about kindness and patience, about being aware of other people. Sometimes when I’m on my way to work, I pray that I can be helpful to others. For me, following Jesus is about serving others, about taking time to help. It’s about noticing.”

Barbara Brown Taylor writes that “encountering another human being is as close to God as I may ever get — in the eye-to-eye thing, the person-to-person thing — which is where God’s Beloved has promised to show up.”

The “person-to-person thing” forms the substance and meaning of Christa’s daily work. Christa works as a behavioral health clinician for three doctors’ offices within Genesis Health System. Here, with people, God in Christ shows up.

In the course of a day, she may team with a physician to interview children who exhibit attention deficit, or she may listen to a new mother struggling with post-partum depression. “Integrating behavioral health into primary medical care is the wave of the future,” says Christa who trained in occupational therapy, psychology, and social work.

While interning in Australia, the home of narrative therapy, Christa came to appreciate “how we story our lives. When we’re stuck with one particular perspective, there may be healthier ways to re-frame the storyline.”

In therapy groups with aboriginal members adopted as children by white families or with adults who had been transplanted to Australia during the WWII bombing of England, Christa experienced how the weight of grief and loss can be lifted in supportive community.

She connects eye-to-eye with people in all their differences. “Christa is attracted to difference,” one woman told her in a therapy training. Hers is not a curiosity for the exotic or the unusual. “I’m drawn to becoming part of a culture and a community, not just visiting a place, but knowing the people.”

It was curiosity that drew Christa and her mother Barbara to St. Paul on the September 2007 day when the new Sanctuary opened up. A Roman Catholic family with roots in neighboring St. Ambrose University, the Orfitellis had watched the construction. After that opening day, Christa just kept coming to the contemporary service. She signed up for a St. Paul reconstruction mission in the Gulf Coast.
Her sense of faithful adventure was fed through the literature of All St. Paul Reads.

In each setting, person to person, Christa has found community. The adventure, after all, is learning how to live together. “The biggest thing I love about mission trips is the sense of community that’s formed. I’m open to trust and intimacy with others, and that helps me dive right in.”

It’s only natural then that Christa, after serving two years on the Congregation Council, will move to the newly-organized Mission Board in 2012.

She says, “That’s where our church’s heart is, in mission. We get to explore different levels of enthusiasm and thoughtfulness for serving. I’m not sure what this will look like, but we will get to know each other better and figure it out together.”

With the companionship of others, we follow Jesus’ footsteps around the corner and into the world. That’s the adventure of discipleship.

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"Faith is a way of looking at what is seen and understanding it in a new sense." ~Frederick Buechner