**Disclaimer:
This blog post is way too long to be considered very well written. Plus it sort of rambles. If you do get through
it, I’d love your comments. I’m extroverted and like to process things with
others, so I’m not presenting answers (which is obvious since I hardly have any), but am mulling through personal thoughts and experiences. What I love about engaging others in these topics is that others can help me see things in a way I may not see on my own.**
When I was a
teenager I remember walking one of my family’s dogs around our roughly 1,500
house neighborhood and daydreaming. I wasn’t usually the one to daydream about
weddings; I tended to daydream about curing cancer. It was usually very specific…
I was on the Today Show discussing how I discovered the cure specific to breast
cancer, but only if it had been detected within a certain number of months. It
was specific, but a breakthrough that could lead to more! (As a creative
writer, I had very detailed daydreams.)
As a teenager I also
became very interested in politics and thought about going to grad school for a
Masters in Political Science. Combined with my Public Relations undergrad, the
idea of being a political speech writer intrigued me (one could even say the
creative writing skill would come in handy- ok a sad, but somewhat realistic, joke). For my undergrad degree I even interned at the North Carolina
headquarters for a particular political party. I loved to write and I loved
politics and it seemed like a good path. Yet, God had a different plan and that
involved divinity school.
Divinity School
is probably where I had the first inklings of giving up my desire to save the
world and instead just focus on loving my neighbor. Some of the best parts of
my education were spent outside the classroom…. a summer in Waco, Texas that was
revolutionary in my life and involved attending church under an interstate
overpass, another summer in a bilingual church when I didn’t know Spanish and
had a small glimpse into what it feels like to be marginalized, a winter on the
West Side of Chicago, and a trip to Belize that opened my eyes to one of my
spiritual gifts. By the time I graduated from divinity school in 2008 I had
very different views of the world than I previously had. It’s very hard to talk
about the poor in an objective sense, essentially viewing an entire segment of
America as a statistic, when you’ve played Scrabble at the homeless shelter and
realized your tablemates weren’t strangers, but somewhere along the line had
become friends.
I eventually
pursued a Master of Social Work, but it was always in the pursuit of a biblical
view of social justice. I wanted a social work degree to aid my Master of
Divinity degree. The combination of theology and social work is dear to my
heart and if you read the Bible- really read the Bible- you’ll see the message
woven throughout that Jesus commands, as opposed to suggests, that we care for
our neighbors, particularly the vulnerable.
I’m now a
practicing social worker working toward my full license, but the purpose of
social work is something that often rattles around in my brain. I think of Jane
Adams and the Hull House of Chicago and consider that most modern-day social
work barely resembles its origins. Social work was about challenging unfair
systems and being relational neighbors with others. In fact, the origins of
social work are very biblical. Now, social work seems to mean being a
government employee with all the benefits thereof.
These thoughts
came to the forefront of my mind as I listened to a well-accomplished social
worker speak recently. She had wonderful advice and had done a lot for people.
However, she discussed that the state had received more money and now DSS could
hire a good number of intake assessment workers to help people determine
eligibility for benefits.
I sat in my seat
wondering, “Is this the right response?” Is it reasonable to see a need and
solve it by hiring more people to distribute resources as solutions? Are these
solutions sustainable? How do we reconcile an economy with a supposed budget
with the well-being of our neighbors? But the main question that flooded my
mind was, “Why is the solution to hire more people to assess for benefits? Why
don’t we look at society and seriously consider why the need is growing? If
social work does what it intends to do, we should get to the day when others
don’t need to have their incomes assessed to get by. Doesn’t the system often seem
to encourage us to see others as objective statistics?”
It would be
absolutely awesome if I had answers to these questions. The truth of the matter
is, there aren’t enough people who care to address the problem to rid the need
of government involvement. And if my faith informs my life, and the Bible is
clear about caring for the poor, shouldn’t I vote in a way that focuses on the
marginalized? After all, the abolitionists could only do so much without the
Emancipation Proclamation.
But then I think
about what a classmate in divinity school once said about how Jesus never told
us to vote a man into office to give out cloaks, but to give our own cloak. How
do I reconcile that statement of blunt truth with the severe need in our nation
and the lack of personally invested people to partner in those needs? How do I
reconcile my personal views of social justice with what society says it is?
One of the ways
my faith involves my social work practice is that I fully believe relationships
are the point of life. We were made to be in relationship with God, and then
with each other. The Bible is the story of our Creator pursuing us for
relationship. Personal change doesn’t happen because someone was accepted into
a program with an income assessor; change happens because someone entered a
relationship with another person who was a neighbor, and ultimate change
happens when someone enters a relationship with the living Christ. So then the
question ceases to be so much about how programs are run as much as it is about
who I am in relationship with others and what greater Hope I point toward.
One of the
reasons everyone seems to have a different view of what is appropriate social
justice is that we all see the world through the specific lens of our
experience and if that’s all we’ve known, we have to work to consider other
experiences. For me, growing up in middle-class America with a military father,
I learned what I call “the boot camp mentality.” You have to start at the
bottom and you may get treated unfairly and get overloaded with grunt work, but
its part of the process of growing in a career. My father is a hard-working man
and I learned a lot from him. As I’ve grown into an adult, I’ve seen that my
boot camp started at a higher level than many others. My parents worked hard to
provide for our family and I got to start at a middle-class boot camp; not
everyone starts there.
So
is the answer that people just need to work harder? Logic and reason say to
work hard and you’ll work your way to the top. I think most of us have lived
long enough to realize people are more complicated than logic and reason.
Psychology, though it may be a soft science, is one of the most powerful and
insightful fields of study. People are a messy combination of reason, emotions,
fears, defenses, hopes, confusions, and complexities. Our environment shapes
the way we see the world. It’s as if children get a pass until they turn 18 and
once that happens, they should know better. We say children didn’t choose to be
born and yet, somehow, with poverty and the messages received growing up, we
expect them to magically become adults who resemble us; who act and think like
we do. It doesn’t work that way.
How
do we hold in tension the various factors of poverty: environment, early
childhood influences, a history of oppression in our country, and the
psychology of what it means to grow up in a neighborhood different than I did?
We want to sift through the populous and crown the worthy poor; those who we
determine to deserve the aid. And yet, Jesus was all about us- who aren’t
worthy at all, but receive his grace.
So,
with all the factors of different experiences, legitimate system abuse, and
need that doesn’t seem to be shrinking, what is the marriage between the
broader scope of the government to handle issues and the private and church
population? I’m a proponent of separation of church and state, but that doesn’t
mean the approach to poverty can only be one or the other.
In terms of
politics I like to think I’m middle of the road (talk about bi-partisan, in
2008 I donated to the Obama campaign and then decided to vote for McCain). I am
under no illusion that a man-made political party can remedy all of our
nation’s ills. Nor do I think the government is the sole answer. I’ve run HUD
programs for the homeless and they are full of ridiculous notions that make it
easy for someone to stay in poverty. I’ve actually once said out loud, “HUD
breaks my heart.”
Realizing
my views of poverty are limited in that I’ve never been in poverty, I’ve come
to the conclusion that government involvement has the potential to be a good thing.
Programs aren’t either all good or all bad, they help some people, but they’re
also dysfunctional. I can’t support some of the ways HUD runs things and
frankly, programs like food stamps barely resemble what they were intended to
be (check out the history of food stamps being a means to meet the needs of
hunger and farmer surplus and that people took ownership in the program by
investing in it with their own money and getting a return that they couldn’t
have gotten with their original investment alone).
I
still haven’t been able to answer my own questions and the more I try to answer
them, the more questions I have. There’s valuable experience I have and so much
that I don’t know. Perhaps answering the questions isn’t the point. I so easily
focus on what I should be doing, what the government should be doing, what the
church should be doing, and forget to remember who we are supposed to BE. Regardless
of whether government programs exist or not, it doesn’t change my
responsibility to live out my faith in a way that cares for the least of these.
I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t matter if HUD has policies that are blind
to reality or food stamps and social security aren’t currently what they were
intended to be. My calling is to love God and love my neighbors. That’s the
call. The way in which that call manifests itself is different for each person.
Some are called to challenge policy, some are called to address the needs of
poverty in other ways. But all of us are called to be relational neighbors.
Maybe
it’s time I stop letting myself get distracted with the arguments about
politics and social work and into what they have evolved. It’s easy to get
distracted by a think tank type of mentality and argue theories, yet I’ve come
to realize that my call to love my neighbor has very little to do with what it means to be
a social worker; it’s about being a follower of Christ. I need to stop being
distracted by what doesn’t matter. The method, whether it be social work or
not, isn’t the point. The relationship is.
