"...what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."

~Micah 6:8

Finding Home

My name is Margie Smith, and I joined Saint John’s in October 2024 after moving to Austin from North Texas. To understand me is to know of my grandmother, Foy Wise, who lived her long life in rural Arkansas. When my grandmother was a teen, she spent the night at a friend’s house and attended church services with the family. The following Sunday, a timid young woman was called to the front of her own church to be banned as she had taken communion at a church of a different denomination.

I learned of this many years after her passing. The elderly woman that I knew devoutly attended church and had raised her children in a Christian home. It has always been important to me to know that with every possible excuse for bitterness, my grandmother chose love instead: God’s people may have failed but God had not!

I was raised in a conservative church in North Texas which I left at 18. There, I often heard condemnation of people and religions that were different from us. After years of distrusting organized religion, I attended a Methodist service and heard that all were welcome at the communion table. I knew God had led me to hear those words of love, and that I had found home. Through that church, I learned of the United Women in Faith and the opportunities they provide to serve God and others.

I am so grateful to now be a part of Saint John’s and our United Women in Faith group. Recognizing how important a safe and secure home is, my heart has been especially touched by one of the current projects that Saint John's UWF is working on, alongside the Saint John's Risk-Taking Mission and Service (RTMS) team. It is the Paper Dolls to Free Families Project, a campaign that is a joint initiative of the Children's Defense Fund and the National Coalition to End Family and Child Detention. As part of this project, volunteer activists can help to peacefully protest family detention by ICE by creating, decorating, and mailing paper dolls with messages of hope as a visual demand to lawmakers to shut down detention centers like the one in Dilley, Texas. 

We will have a table in the Gallery the next two Sundays where you can learn more about the project and pick up some pre-cut paper dolls with instructions for how to participate in this important work. I hope that you will also join us this Sunday during Churchwide Sunday School in the Great Hall (see details below), and that together we can find our voices to speak out against these harmful detention practices. It is a privilege to share God’s love by being a voice for those suffering who are not being heard.