Seriously.

I've been silent for a long time.

I spend a lot of my days at Rising Hope relatively silent--relative to my normal talking rate, that is. I listen. I hear stories, or half-baked rants or complaints or disrespectful comments. If I get honest with myself, I truly don't know what to think about it most of the time. I shake my head, drop my chin, and try to get on with my day. The sheer weight of a lot of the things that go on at Rising Hope is...enormous. And I don't really know what to do about it.

People ask me all the time how I'm liking it here, whether or not I miss home, what I think of the work, etc. etc. but I don't feel like many of them want my real answers. For one, my real answers would take more time than they want to offer me at the moment. For two, they all seem to be looking for some cute anecdote or amazing story of redemption. Truthfully? Very little of what I do is what I would call "cute."

Sure, every Tuesday we allow kids to play in some water games out back in the parking lot and every Wednesday we take them to the movies. And some of them...really all of them...are ridiculously cute. They have moments of being total angels--bright of face, sweet of spirit, unexpressably kind to one another and bear-hugging all of life they can get. And then they have moments where they look a lot more like me and the rest of humanity; whiny, petulant, ungrateful, and brokenly beautiful. But it's so easy to become detached or pessimistic. I flirt with a happy, dazzling four-year-old boy, giggling and tickling and teasing him into eating his lunch, and then I wonder what will happen to him as he grows up. Who will his friends be? What if his mom loses her work? Will he end up out on the street, too? Will he end up behind bars?

Will he, like so many of the people we see every day, become a victim of forces beyond his control and then grow up believing that nothing is in his control?

And I don't mean to make the situation seem hopeless, because it's not. It's so beautiful and messed up and broken and full of stories and redemption and love, but the latter seem so few and far between and the vastness of 2,000 homeless people in one of the richest counties in the richest country in the world...

I just don't know what to do with it. I can't fit it in my head or in my heart or in my arms. I can't find a handhold to grapple with it. Here I am, in the thick of it every day for 5 weeks, and I still can't figure it. I don't know if I'm running from it because it's too hard or if it just needs a lot of time to sink in. Slowly, slowly, it's sinking in. It's penetrating everything. And while that's happening, a lot of well-meaning people are approaching me and saying "So what do you think of your work here?" and I think to myself, you know, I'm really not sure, but I guarantee it's not the answer you're looking for. Usually I throw in the words "challenging" or "stretching" but always end with "but still fun" or "it's really been great to be here."
And I feel fake.
And I sound fake.
But I just don't know what else to do.

The truth is it's discouraging. It's hard. It's frustrating to the point of popping blood vessels, but not because of the craziness coming from our oddball constituents. The people I trip over are the have's, not the have-not's. Some of them work with us. Some of them just bring donations. All of them mean well but clearly harbor some feeling that the homeless are on a different kind of level and seek a different kind of life than they do. A lot of people bring a lot of amazing things to Rising Hope. And a lot of people just bring one man's trash and expect it to be one homeless man's treasure. And sometimes, I just want to look at these people and say, "With all due respect, sir, sometimes trash is just trash, and we're not a disposal service."

But I don't say that.
I take things, and I smile, and I rage inside, and I reflect on Micah 6:8. And that's where God always takes my hand and helps me up after I've tripped over myself, or the Trash Man.
(Act justly.) -yep. I know I've given my best to act justly today.
(Love mercy.) -yep. I know I've really striven to be merciful today.
(Walk humbly with your God.) -ummm...well crap. And then I pray that God will help me take my shaking-with-frustration hand and put it in the hands of those he's placed around me and simply walk. I can't stand uncritically and idly by, but I certainly can't wrench my hand away in disgust and indignant belief that I have found a better way. The fact that these people have found a way is an out-and-out miracle. And I've found my way with them and I like them. Sometimes in spite of myself, but I like them. And like any family we roll our eyes at each other and sometimes want to scream and sometimes get screamed at and sometimes share side-splitting laughter and sometimes feel like walking away and never looking back.
But the minute I see someone messing with one of our people I get so prickly and defensive I can hardly sit still. Sometimes it's people in the Rising Hope family itself. Sometimes, unfortunately, it's the Fairfax County police. And sometimes it's this great invisible wall of Accepted Apathy, and it's built of structures and omissions and dishonesty and government programs and well-meaning people who bring used bottles of salad dressing and 27 year-old pasta packets to people who probably "won't know the difference anyhow."

So I guess this post is me ceasing my 5 week silence. It's me refusing to give the cute story or the patent answer because even though they exist, they're not what it's about and they're not what I've become. I'm raging and railing against the wall of Accepted Apathy aloud now, just like I have been within myself.

But I know that I am not alone.

Martin Luther King railed against that wall. Shane Claiborne rails against that wall. Anne Lamott, Joe Culumber, Pastora Martha de la Rosa, and millions of others rail against the wall.

I grew up reading about the standard subjects for third and fourth graders. I read about Titanic in third grade. I read about the civil war and slavery in the fourth grade. I read about the civil rights movement in fifth grade. But everything that had to do with fights for humanity (I notice in retrospect) struck a deeply resonating chord within me. I devoured everything I could about the civil war and civil rights when I was younger. I checked out nearly all the books about the subjects from my school library. I all but worshipped Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks and MLK. I was sick at how low-income people were treated on board the Titanic and deeply saddned about how lopsided the survival figures were. And over and over again I would think to myself, pray to God, or whisper beneath my breath, "I hope if I had lived back then I would've gone against slavery." Or segregation. Or allowing 'more important' people onto the lifeboats.

I was leaving the Lincoln Memorial with my mother and father a couple of weeks ago. They had come to visit and we decided to view the monuments by night. We walked along beside the reflecting pool with the words of Abraham Lincoln ringing in our ears, our downhome-boy from Illinois, who wrote these truth-drippingly relevant words in 1865: "Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause
of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself
should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less
fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray
to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.
It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's
assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces;
but let us judge not, that we be not judged.""
My mother and I had read those words aloud in the monument and we could feel each of our hearts aching, wondering how it seems we could have gone so far away from that sentiment, wondering why on earth this country had allowed its presidents to seemingly stray so far from it. I asked my Mom how we could have wandered so far away, and quickly she said, "Apathy."
We sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and thought in black-and-white pictures of Martin Luther King and his dream, his demand that Lincoln's signed check of freedom be cashed in 100 years later.
And then we walked along that reflecting pool together and I told them about being little and praying that I would've fought on the right side. "And that's why I'm doing this," I said. "The fight isn't over. There are still things that need fighting. I think that, more than anything, is why I'm doing this this summer." And my Dad said "You're absolutely right." And my Mom said, "Honey, we knew that."

But until then, I hadn't known that.

So my job isn't cutesy. I can't fit my hands around it. I want to yell at the belligerent man who comes to lunch and then criticizes the people who prepare it sometimes. I want to pull my hair out sometimes and sometimes I want to cry, or hide, or just come home. But I couldn't in a million years, because that all-cursed Wall still stands smugly invisible.
...and I can't help thinking that at least if I beat my hands bloody, the color might allow people to notice the wall, and then maybe they'll think that it ought to come down, too. Because then they, like me, will get messed up because they'll always know it's there and it'll drive them crazy. Maybe I can ruin somebody's peaceful, comfortable life. And actually no, not "maybe I."

But maybe I can help the God who makes it an annoying habit to ruin people's peaceful, comfortable lives.