I took my kids to a coffee shop in a nearby town I used to work in. It’s in an old house and full of local art and has a huge wrap around porch. I remember coming here with a woman who chain smoked and we would sit outside and have our sessions there, sipping coffee. At the time, my go-to was a mocha with raspberry, so that’s what I got today even though black coffee is my current go-to.
I was 22 when I started that job. I had been a college graduate and a mother for less than a year. I had a Psych degree with a minor in English and my life experiences were a middle ground of many things along with some true heartache and losses but I was overall still pretty shiny and my understanding of people different than me was mainly head knowledge.
The job required me to allow the shine to to be rubbed off. And I’ll be honest, I loved that job. I didn’t go to grad school because I wanted to get out into the field.
I told people I’d do the job for free (if I didn’t need to work) because it felt right and necessary and it was something I could DO. It was a mix of therapy and social work but it was considered neither (and I was licensed for neither). The title of the work was community support. I had a caseload and I worked with adults, teens, and children helping them get what they needed (to put it the simplest way possible).
I talked about work a lot then because I was excited and because the world was opening up to me and the more I learned, the more I wanted to share. I wanted the people around me to understand cycles of poverty, mental illness, abuse, therapy, social systems, the needs of the marginalized, and the importance of community. I wanted people to see that they too would make the best bad choice if bad choices were what they had.
I got more out of the work than I believe I ever gave to anyone else. I mean, I did my very best and I do believe that I helped people but for a lot of people I was a person who filled in a gap for a little bit, often one of many “workers” who did a little but maybe not enough even if I did all I could with what I had.
What I gained through the work was a true body for my faith. I was given the privilege to enter lives very different than mine in a very intimate way and through that, my faith formed arms and legs, then hands and feet, and then a voice that was galvanized in the fire of the need I waded in each day. The shine wore off of me, the cliches and easy answers were proven shallow and useless, my old world cracked open, and I doubted and questioned and yelled and demanded more of God. The more these things happened, the more real my faith became. My vision was bigger, clearer, deeper and it had a living breathing place to reside in me, with all the old things cleared away.
My youth leader once wrote me a letter that said something like “may your heart continue to break for others” and what a difficult blessing that has been.
Breaking hurts. Faith is not painless. The practice of faith and hope and love are troublesome and disruptive to most of our norms. They sound pretty, but they are the epitome of getting your hands dirty, they require to you be covered in the debris of a fallen society and broken systems and ugly histories. They sound sweet, but they are a battle cry plunging you into the midst of people you love but who don’t see what you see and who say you are “going too far”. And no matter how I phrase or frame the truths I’ve found, so much of it has fallen anywhere but where I hoped. And then that breaks me again.
I know a lot now about the lives I didn’t live. First I read their case file, but the “on paper” was nothing compared to the real people. The people who were funny and kind and irritated and tired and talented and lost and overall just people, like me and like all the people I had known before. Equally as average and as impressive as anyone else. Equally as capable and needy as anyone else, all things considered. People are always just people, no matter what “kind” of people they are. I was in the country where there weren’t even road signs, just cornfields. I was in parts of cities where I was advised by supervisors to not visit homes once the sun started setting. I was in the really nice part of town where every home was a McMansion. I was at halfway homes. I was at a safehouse. I was in a neighborhood where I knew friends lived nearby. I was everywhere in between. I sat in homes and on porches talking and listening. I went with people to appointments, clinics, food pantries, schools, churches, shelters, group homes, IEP meetings, and DSS waiting rooms. I ate McDonald’s and drank coffee with them. I watched their children grow. I made art with them and told stories with them and laughed with them a cried a little too. I bore witness as they grew and changed and managed recovery and dealt with life. I drove them hours upon hours total to grocery stores, libraries, treatment centers, parks, job interviews, courthouses, and all those other places I already listed plus so many more. In a more recent job, I literally held the bodies of children raging in trauma response while I put them in a therapeutic hold. I absorbed their curse words and dodged thrown objects and avoided being kicked and head-butted as much as possible. I say these things to say, I did real parts of life with people in ways that changed me. In ways I hadn’t done life before.
I’ve spent many days with my job being “support” which has required me to enter into people’s lives and spaces with humility and willingness to listen and accept and help but not “fix” and through years of this, I’ve found myself understanding that my core is no more or less than the people I come to support. All the differences about our lives still don’t make us that different.
I would see a mother pushing her child in a stroller in a part of town known more for crime than safety and the thought “I’m glad I have a safe neighborhood to push my stroller in” shifted to, “She should have a safe place to push her stroller” and then the question “Why shouldn’t I have to push my stroller somewhere like this and why should she?”. I realized during these days that there are many things that I had that I deserved no more than anyone else and on top of that, I began to see all the things I had that I never had to earn or work hard for at all. They just existed in my life and I know some would say that was a blessing but I found it unjust and unsettling. It was one of the many things I fussed with God about. I didn’t want it if they couldn’t have it too. It’s hard to be glad to have what someone else doesn’t have when that someone else is right in front of you and you can’t give it to them.
Once I saw myself in the people I was with, I saw a clear version of myself dealt a different hand and I saw I was absolutely the same as the people I was supporting in so many ways. We may not have to live our lives as victims of our circumstances and we can surely rise from ashes in many ways, but we are undoubtedly shaped by our circumstances and the choices we have within them. I met women my age who were just as smart and talented and driven as me (maybe more) but where they were and where I was did not differ because I just made better choices. I had better choices to choose. That’s just the truth.
What I know is that there are no easy answers and no one size fits all “fix”. Even faith must be ripped apart until it is large enough to fit all the ache. This is messy.
I’ve been accused of choosing “the other side” but it’s not “the other side” to me.
What has happened is that I am no longer able to see myself as a different kind of person than the people I have spent so many of my days with. There are no more “other people”. What they need, I need. What they are, I am. And when you speak ill of them, you do so also of me.
I don’t hate who I am or where I’m from. I don’t hate what I have. I don’t hate the people I love. I just want the people I love to come closer and peek inside this place and see that you belong here too. May there one day be no “other”. And so it would be here as it is in Heaven.
I was thinking, as I drove home from the coffee shop with my kids, that maybe what I want for them is for their hearts to break this same way. For their worlds to open up and their faith to stretch far enough to cover the whole earth that they inhabit so that they can no longer find any “other” in the world, so that all the people will be their people and they will live their lives as such.
