I've been struggling a lot with my faith lately. Sometimes I feel embarrassed by or uncomfortable with the potential perceived cheesiness of living in faith. It's a stupid thing to do in my culture, and since there's no hard evidence that it's the right thing to do, I wonder how defensible it really is. And yet I go on believing because, at some subtle but pervasive level, Christ and the story of divine paradox makes sense to me.
I feel that this dissonance or cynicism with faith affects what I'm doing in this community. I feel, actually, that more people than me are dealing with this, but I won't speak for anyone else. I don't think that doubt mixed with faith is unhealthy—in fact, I think it's the only way to go. But when I've been unwilling to take that seemingly retarded step of talking to a non-material being, and when I've not only forgotten but actually intentionally ignored acknowledging Jesus in what I'm doing, I've noticed that it leads me to discouragement, purposelessness and apathy.
This is mainly because, when I stop believing in the relevance or even existence of God, I replace my original desires for this neighborhood—the ones for non-material, unmeasurable, painful, confusing, beautiful, wonderful circumstances that only God could bring about—with new ones for material, measurable, predictable, safe results that don't necessarily have anything to do with God. What these are, it's hard to say. Sometimes it's whether I find the very, very, very best way to spend the money that I'm supposed to put into the community pool; sometimes it's whether I talk about "something important" with my mentee (his family, his marketable interests, etc.); sometimes it's just a dumb hope that suddenly I know everyone and everything in the neighborhood is dandy. It's whether I've completed task objective X.382 with what degree of quality execution, and whether I can report back to the results-oriented (and affluence-influenced) commander part of myself with, "Task objective X.382 completed, sir," and then give the draftee part of myself a very stern and still unsatisfied salute.
Another guy in the neighborhood put it like this a few days ago: He feels that, compared to all the other anti-school influences in his mentee's life (including the kid's family), his saying once a week that grades and school are important is like pissing in the wind. In terms of actual grade improvement, it's completely ineffectual. I agree.
But something tells me that judging my success or failure by my mentee's grades, or the perfect way to spend community money, or whether people show up to a block party, or if I've gotten to know this many neighbors and done this many easily explainable things with them is a psuedo-materialist, pro-upward mobility, personal improvement-driven, achievement-hungry, ultimately unsatisfying and uninspiring and faith-lacking way to live. When I don't see results I get frustrated and feel guilty because there is only impossible success and inevitable failure, and even if success were reachable it somehow wouldn't be sweet enough to balance out the overriding majority of nothingness, even the nothingness of such success. For example, somehow I'm not very thrilled with the idea of an East Side kid getting a college education, becoming financially successful and growing up to be an incredibly gifted, fortunate, business-savvy ... suburban consumerist bastard. That kind of success just doesn't inspire me, and doesn't seem worth my time, and it doesn't seem like what God would be interested in. Not that God doesn't want physical, educational and social needs met—but that more information, more money in the wallet, more technology and more stability has never been the real answer. It leads to the kind of stuff-drunkenness that suburbia is plagued with, and it leads away from God.
So I guess I've reached a point where, like we want to do with the community center, I want to have no clear, nor hidden, agenda when I talk to people other than to be Christ to them. I'm not sure what this means yet, but it's definitely a lot more about how patient, open, bold, courteous, thankful, gentle, loving and kind I am with people and a lot less about how I can try to fix people, change something or do anything at all.
My highlight of the past semester with Javier, my mentee, was at the Christmas play. I didn't do anything at all. It wasn't one-on-one and there was no conversation whatsoever. I just sat there in the audience and smiled, made him laugh when he was supposed to be getting ready for his lines and clapped at the end. But the whole time I was just appreciating him, and I think he was appreciating that. And I didn't do anything at all except for show up and blend in.
—Evan
Recent Comments