On the Road to Recovery & Renewal
A little over a month ago, I came to Soteria for my first day as a grant writer. I was in a period of significant transition: not only was I starting a new job, but I was still fairly fresh to sobriety. My life was more or less like a car up on cinder blocks and looking just as ugly. I was getting up under and into the guts of it, doing piecemeal repairs and throwing out the faulty parts of the way I’d been living in years past in an attempt to get things running again. I’d done a lot of damage driving that old life around so recklessly, to others and to myself.
The grant writing job, which gave me the chance to use my love of writing in a way that felt meaningful and useful to others, seemed like the perfect opportunity to put into practice daily one of the primary principles of the AA program I’d been working: selfless service. It mystified me that you could be paid for such a thing, paid to advocate for and improve the circumstances of the downtrodden and disenfranchised. But Soteria is staffed by career servants, people whose life’s work is tirelessly championing the cause of justice in the Greenville community. Even if the tasks are administrative or financial it is understood that the real job is loving others full-time. This is totally alien to a person who has only worked in retail and food service for their entire working life. And even more alien was that this full-time love applied to me, even in my broken down state.
When I first arrived at Soteria I was more than a little bit timid and tentative. And the people in the office around me were so loud: vocal in their faith and in their joy. They were each zealous in their love of God and continuous praise of His love for them. They were totally unabashed in their roles as sons and daughters of the Kingdom, as the hands and feet of the church. I loved God too, and was grateful for His work in my life, but I expressed it in my own quiet way - that is, I didn’t really talk about it. Talking about provision and providence and praise a little too passionately might, I worried, make me look like a fool. You might recall the crowd’s assessment of the apostles as they preached at Pentecost: “They are full of the new wine!” I had particular interest in making sure no one had any suspicion I’d taken a drop of wine new or old. I’m sort of kidding, of course, but there might be a deeper truth there.
The way Christians are called to behave is fundamentally baffling to the world, whose categories for what can and should be done are significantly more constricted. When faced with the eyes of the world, who might perceive the jubilance and worship as a strain of insanity, it’s easy to become self-conscious and momentarily sheath the glittering, disconcerting edge of your faith. It may seem impossible to meet the chaos of the world with not just optimism but an abiding certainty that good can be done. It requires a trust that borders lunacy to give one’s time and energy so generously to a cause. As I began to settle into Soteria and get to know its staff and clients in a more meaningful way, it became clearer and clearer that no one I worked with gave in to that self-consciousness: they owned the fact that they were living in their own second chances and celebrated and shared their joy in this without shame.
They celebrated my recovery, encouraging me in my continued pursuit of sobriety. At times they seemed more excited about it than I was. What’s more, they met me where I was at and sought to help reestablish my stability in meaningful, material ways. The number of organizations that will give their employees a car are few and far between: mine is one of them. These provisions felt deliberate on their part: in assisting me materially, they were demonstrating their trust and compassion for me and continuing the work that Christ had begun in each of them. But in the midst of so much goodness I began to wonder a rather tiresome wonder: Why me?
The question rears its head, at least for me, when things are going well: Why me? It crawls over my brain like a fly over untended food. Well, it’s not necessarily a bad question. And it, I assume, doesn’t just hound me alone. It demands an answer from each of us. Why us? What did we do to warrant the showering of blessing and privilege that we so often take for granted? What did we do to deserve to be seen as more than our failures and faults? How did I stumble into so much grace?
The answer is that none of us deserve it, but Christ came into the world to save sinners. Each of us falls under the accusation of Romans 3:10 - none are righteous. Through that salvific work the brokenness of the world begins to be reversed and the world is populated with little dioramas of resurrection for those who are willing to look. Not only are these resurrections in miniature being worked out in my life, but the lives of each of our clients. The issue is we can become arrogant in our privilege, the status that is given not earned, and can fall into the sort of thinking that puts ourselves ahead on the ethical scoreboard. Once answered, the question of Why me? necessitates another more uncomfortable question: Why not them? Why should grace not be extended to the individual with a criminal record? Why do we group these people into a substratum of society, defining them by their past wrongs by calling them “felons” or convicts?” The answer is there is no reason that the grace that abounds for us should not abound for them as well, that alienating any group of people is an offense to God. The answer is there is no reason why those that society typically views with suspicion or repulsion should not be offered the same chances as us.
But prejudice pops up in the places we would choose to ignore, even for myself. I must continually remind myself of my state as a sinner, of my need for grace and thus my call to mobilize and manifest this grace to others through the work of the spirit in me. Faith is a very practical and radical thing: it asks how can I love my neighbor as God loves me, how can I see my neighbor as God sees me? We must be on guard against being too soft-spoken in our faith and zeal to serve as I was when I first came to Soteria. Hiding our faith, our belief in the ability of the Spirit to enact lasting change through us (particularly in light of the political cynicism of the present day) hinders our witness dramatically. What good work the Lord has done for each of us who believe and continues to do for those we serve! It is only right that these works be shared. The witness of this and the chance to experience it deserves to be brought to the suffering and the needy.
It is sometimes a disheartening thing, to be called to work in a world that is subject to such fallenness. Jacques Ellul sums up the tension well: “...on the one hand it is impossible for us to make the world less sinful; on the other hand it’s impossible for us to accept it as it is.” Yes, it’s no lie that each of us labors under a curse and alone our strength is negligible. But the Spirit emboldens us and the labor remains, as imperfectly as it might be done, for all who accept the call to do it: each of us working tirelessly with our time, talents, and treasure to build the scaffolding for the presence of the Kingdom little by little. And to strive towards the completion of that labor is the work I do, that Soteria does and that I hope you will join us in.
