Homeless blunders

On a Friday night in December I led the homeless ministry prayer and scripture before a meal that my church serves in Logan Circle every Friday night. It was the first time that I had led anything in this ministry and I had a plan for how the night would go. That plan failed miserably.

It was super cold and breezy that night and I knew that I needed to keep it short. I planned to just read the passage from Isaiah about the suffering servant and pray, keeping less than five minutes if possible. I was going to explain how our God knows what suffering is like, knows what homelessness is like, and can relate to the deepest pains we have as humans, because he chose to live it. I thought it would be simple and relate well to the Christmas season, reminding all of us why we celebrate Jesus's birth. However, it was extremely hard to gain anyone's attention. I assume that the general inattentiveness was in part a result of the cold, the food being late, and my lack of assertiveness in the situation, but I felt for a moment like a street corner evangelist, yelling to get anyone's attention, and it irked me. I fumbled my message and preached a prayer, all the while having a glaring sense of myself as a fake.

Despite this awkward moment, it wasn't the most awkward of the evening. I was hanging around to have conversation with some of the people who come for the meal, asking how their lives are, and if they need anything that I can offer. One of the guys told me that his life really sucks. That it's not at all like what he expected it to be in Philly. I asked if he wanted to talk about it, and he just shrugged it off, generally implying that it is what it is. I wanted to care a bit more, so pried asking if I could pray for him and he glaringly responded that he was an atheist.

Now on normal days when I have some tinge of extroversion, I would like to think that I respond with a curious tone, wanting to know why he doesn't believe anything more than non-belief in everything, how that has shaped his life. But this day, I was already dejected and I really just wanted to crawl back into my shell of introversion, and I shut down.

I think I said something like, "Oh. Alright then. I might still pray because I think it matters, but you are welcome to continue to come and bring anyone to this meal. Especially to the Christmas service next week."

Actually, I think I'm watering down how awkward it actually was and what I actually said. I thought later about it and still think that conversation as a complete laps of real care, concern, or representation of what I want to be like as a Christ-follower.

But I guess that's just it. This blog isn't meant to be a lament of Christ-following failure; it's meant to point out that MY CONCEPT of righteousness is flawed. Look at how my plans and ideas shaped everything about that night: I had a plan for a message. I had an idea of how to communicate effectively with homeless people. I had an idea of what it looks like to share love from God with non-Christ-followers. Instead of my actions being an outpouring of belief, my concept of righteousness shaped my disappointment.

This flaw is, as most are with me and I would wager with us all, a control issue. If we control our plans, our ideas, our concepts of goodness, then we can measure the quality of our work and convince ourselves that we are doing good. By this measure, most of the time, I find my work to be less than adequate. I know what excellence is to me and I rarely, if ever, measure up. In fact, I sometimes feel trapped by incompleteness.

What if I lived by a different measure? What if that measure was already determined about me and nothing I did could change it? What if an entire community of people lived this way/What would that look like? Would it make a difference in the way we live? Would it make a difference in the world?