What We Carried Home: Four Lessons from Jacob’s Ladder

Leave some space in your suitcase when packing for a mission trip, because you won’t be coming home with the same heart you left with.

For students from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), a week at Mustard Seed Communities in Jamaica grew from a spring break excursion into an invitation to see the world differently.

Last month, a dozen UMBC students spent one renewing week at Jacob’s Ladder, MSC’s home for adults living with disabilities in Moneague, Jamaica. Throughout the week, the volunteers worked on landscaping projects, played sports with residents and staff, and shared quiet moments of connection with people who had a great deal to teach them.

Here, they encountered a way of life that felt strikingly different from their own: one not focused on productivity, pressure, or performance, but on people. Guided by MSC’s four pillars of simplicity, generosity, freedom, and community, the students quickly found themselves letting go of expectations and rediscovering the beauty of simple, human connection.

Can you fit these four lessons into your suitcase?

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Lesson #1: Simplicity Is Learning To Be Present

For UMBC sophomore Niko Techur, transformation began with a single encounter on his very first morning at Jacob’s Ladder.

A resident named Dormaine ran up to him, arms open wide, and pulled him into a tight, warm hug: no introduction required, no explanation needed.

“His face was bright with joy,” Niko recalled, “with a smile from ear to ear.”

Over the days that followed, the two danced together, laughed together, and held hands during Mass. This seed of a greeting grew into one of the defining relationships of the week.

What Niko found in that friendship was something he hadn’t known he was missing: a way of connecting that asked nothing of him. “I experienced love in a new, profound way,” he reflected.

At Jacob’s Ladder, abundance didn’t look like productivity in class or achievement at work. It looked like a hand extended across a circle, a shared meal, or an afternoon of dancing.

The residents greeted visitors with outstretched arms, looking not for anything elaborate but for something deeply human. And in receiving that kind of welcome, the students began to understand what Niko came to articulate by the end of the week: “The simplicity and faith of those who seem like they have less than us does not compare to the greatest capacity they have to love.”

Life, stripped down to its essentials, did not feel lacking.

Actually, it felt very, very full.

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Lesson #2: Freedom Is Putting Down the Weight You Carry

For Brandon Jacobs, a pre-med sophomore at UMBC, that same spirit of abundance through a simpler life revealed itself through a different lens. 

His first transformative encounter came at My Father’s House in Kingston, where students visited residents living with profound physical disabilities. Brandon was struck immediately by the severity of what the residents faced. And then, just as quickly, by something else entirely.

“The residents were not wallowing in self-pity or looking defeated,” he said. “In fact, they were quite joyful.” Many could not speak, and yet a connection still formed. 

Timothy Shaia, another student in the group, found himself relying on the same unspoken language: “I cherished how genuine moments of connection came about without words—like through hugs, handshakes, and eye contact.” 

After departing My Father’s House for Jacob’s Ladder, Brandon said he felt “honored to have witnessed the residents’ resolve and contentment in the face of severe physical challenge.”

When you are not carrying your own baggage around, it is almost as if you have more strength to lift up another.

Back at Jacob’s Ladder, that sense of freedom deepened. Brandon noticed that something had lifted from him—some habitual weight he’d been carrying without realizing it. “Jacob’s Ladder felt like a home away from home,” he said. “I did not need to perform. I did not need to be somebody else.”

He traced the contrast carefully. “In the U.S., I can love and be loved, sure, but only if I meet a certain criteria. Only if I work hard enough. Only if I perform. We’re all so absorbed in ourselves not because we mean to, but because we’re trying to survive. We’re trying to become good enough.” 

At MSC, that pressure simply wasn’t present, Brendan reports. And in its absence, he found he had more to offer. “When you are not carrying your own baggage around,” he reflected, “it is almost as if you have more strength to lift up another.”

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Lesson #3: Generosity Is the Gift of Showing Up for Others

If simplicity was what the students found at Jacob’s Ladder, and freedom was what the home gave them, then generosity was what they witnessed. They saw generosity not as an occasional gesture, but as a steady, effortless way of being.

It was a small moment: a soccer game, a goal, a friend on the sideline. But for Brandon, it crystallized something about what he’d been experiencing all week. “He is a giver that I aspire to be like,” he said of Samuel. “Giving is not difficult for him.” That ease of generosity, natural and without calculation, was what made it so striking. 

At MSC, generosity isn’t something people give when they have enough left over. Generosity is a way of moving through the world.

“Never have I been to a place where those with disabilities are the center of attention,” Brandon observed. “At Mustard Seed,” he said, “it really is all about the disadvantaged.”

The effect of that inversion was quietly radical: when you center those who are often overlooked, the whole shape of daily life changes. What gets valued, what gets time, what gets care … all of it shifts.

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Lesson #4: Community Is Where the Holy Lives

By the end of the week, the students had begun to understand something that is difficult to name but easy to feel: that what they’d encountered at Mustard Seed was not only warmth, or hospitality, or even love in the ordinary sense. It was something sacred.

For Niko, the moment that made it most clear came during Mass, with his friend Dormaine beside him. Throughout the entire service, Dormaine held his hand tightly and without letting go. “I recognized the undying faith each resident had,” Niko said.

In that moment, it was not just Dormaine holding my hand, but God within him.

Timothy found the same quality in circle time: in shared grins, in laughter, in the particular ease that comes from being with people who are entirely themselves. “Circle time was very meaningful because I had a lot of fun dancing,” he said. “It made me feel much more relaxed throughout the trip.” 

Joy, it turned out, was not separate from the holiness. It was part of it.

Fr. Matt Himes, who accompanied the group, sums up the feeling of living at MSC for a week: “It is a holy place,” he said. “Living in community with one another and the residents and staff makes this experience truly unique and truly holy.”

Holiness, the students discovered, lives in the ordinary: in a hand held during Mass, in a goal celebrated by a friend who had no reason to care so much, in a hug on a first morning that asked for nothing and gave everything.

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Simplicity, Freedom, Generosity, Community: Bring Them Home with You

At the end of the week, the students carried home something that can’t fit in a suitcase: a glimpse of what it looks like when a community is built not around performance or productivity, but around love for other people. 

That’s the rhythm of life we hope to play at Mustard Seed Communities.

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Thank you, UMBC volunteers, for spending spring break with us! We extend heartfelt gratitude to Niko Techur, Brandon Jacobs, Timothy Shaia, and Fr. Matt Himes for sharing your reflective wisdom with us.