Brienda was ordained a deacon on Sunday October 12th 2003. Linda Milton-Kyak is by her side.
Coming from a community of about 1,300 people located on the northern tip of Baffin Island, I never dreamed that one day I would be with a group of Inuit going "down south" to preach the word of our Lord. We are in an area where we are limited to a lot of the things that most people have easy access to. It is a place where we have to leave home to get a better education, to see a doctor, to go have our babies and the only way in and out of the community is by air. People from the south have come to teach us in school, in church and on the job. It isn't an easy place to live in and most of the year it is cold.
But Praise the Lord, our Father is not a respector of persons. He chose four people from a remote community where it is cold and harsh most of the year to go and spread the good news.
As I grew up I developed a certain image of the qallunaat (white people). They were an upper class society, where they had their certain standards and we the Inuit would never fit into it. They were the ones that came and taught us to live and to be able to work in their environment. In a way I guess I saw them as people that God favoured more than the Inuit. But during those ten days I learned that God is not like that. I saw "people", people hungry for the Lord and looking for answers to very tough questions. I saw people looking up to us for answers instead of looking down at us for not knowing anything. But we didn't have the answers that they were looking for. For only God knows the answers to all of lifes questions.
During those two weeks that I was gone, God changed some things within me. Things I thought weren't there and things I thought didn't matter. I had a hard time seeing qallunaat as people because they were "higher" than I was and during that time God changed my view about that. Now I seem them the same way as I would anyone else. But most important is that God sees all of us that way...we are all the same in His eyes and in His heart and He loves us all equally. It doesn't matter if you're from the north, south, east or west....God Still Loves You. He is not a respector of persons. Praise the Lord!!!!! He just asks that we love one another as He loves us, that we pray and seek His face always and open our hearts to do His will.
Thank you to those that set this up for us, those that opened their hearts and homes to us and made us feel like family, those that took the time to care for us during the entire mission....Jesus did shine through you. May God pour His Blessings upon you and reveal Himself to you. Most of all I thank the Lord for all that He has done and is still doing for us today.
In Jesus Christ,
Brenda