my need

Nine years ago, after years of serving in our community, I started to see the need to move from a charity mindset to more of a development, relational understanding of service and engaging.   I remember being at House of Hope, spending some time in dialogue with some of the women there, and thinking about how they didn’t have a network of support that worked for them.   I started to understand that relationships were the critical factor for change, and I thought about that largely in terms that they were the ones who needed development.  I knew that I would be mutually impacted by the women, but I didn’t think that I needed a new worldview, or that I really needed the women from House of Hope.  If you cut me open, I still felt like I had everything to give and nothing really to receive. 

Not long after I began to think about transformational and wholistic development, I flew out to Long Beach, CA, for a Renovare Spiritual Formation Conference.  I befriended a local homeless clan while there, and I spent a few breaks and meals with this group of primarily five adults who hung out in the courtyard between two hotels.  While I was eating dinner with my conference friends toward the end of my stay in Long Beach, I watched one of my new friends, Betty, walk up the street toward a public bathroom that she used.  I had a divine revelation at that moment about just how much I was the one who needed transformation and development.  God, in the middle of a lot of spiritual formation messages, some good solitude that week, and my interaction with this group of friends without a home, stopped me in my tracks and revealed something to me at a new level about my need for them. 

Seven months later, I found myself in Phoenix, AZ, shadowing Kit Danley, and I’ll never forget sitting across from her at lunch saying, “We need each other, right?  We’re interdependent, the poor and rich need each other.”  I’ll never forget her look.  It was a piercing look into my soul.  And with very carefully constructed, intentional words, she replied, “You need the poor.  The poor don’t need you.”  I am sure I gave her a nod like I understood what she meant, but the truth is, I was desperately uncomfortable with what she told me, and at the same time, I knew she was trying to tell me something very important that she could tell I did not yet “get”. 

Fast forward over the past 8 years of my life.  God has slowly but surely been helping me to understand what Kit was trying to tell me.  It’s really a similar concept as our coming to Christ.  I can play church, do things for God, try to be a good person, know about God, and more, but not until I recognize my deep brokenness and sin and my desperate need for Jesus, do I really get an “aha” that I have nothing to give…there’s nothing I can do…to earn God’s love.  It’s about seeing myself for who I really am, recognizing my need, and receiving the Savior’s love and work on the cross for me.  When I live in that new way of being and identity, I will give and do, but it’s out of a new way of seeing and being. 

The same is true about reconciliation and justice.  We who are materially resourced and walking among the privileged and dominant culture often read Scripture about doing for and giving to those who are poor or those who are marginalized and oppressed.   Unknowingly, we consider them from a mindset of power, and a mindset of us and them. We often don’t really believe we need them…but we believe they need us.  We often don't believe we have a critical need for them in our lives, that they actually have something very important to offer us, and that their very lives, culture, and voices will help us to see and be in a new way that is critical for the Gospel, for reconciliation, for justice. 

I know I still have a lot to unlearn and to learn about my own internalized superiority and my ignorance and arrogance, but I am now growing more aware of it, and I am convinced that I must have people different from myself in my life to teach me the truth.  Those whom society often discounts and sees as “the least of these” have helped me more accurately see Jesus, myself, and others.  Their voices have helped me to take off blinders and to come out of denial, blame, justifying, minimizing and into a new light of how we’re set up to maintain divisions and stratification.  I’ve been broken and taken down by revelations that were once not apparent to me but that are coming into the light.  This lament, confession, repentance has been the critical intersection for me as I’ve grieved the brokenness in me, in my people group, and throughout history.  And as I’ve grieved for brothers and sisters whose lives have been impacted adversely by injustice.   This lament and place of brokenness and powerlessness is exactly where Christ’s power shows up.  It’s exactly this powerlessness and proximity that is changing the way I view our community.   Though I am still acting and doing and serving, I recognize that if I stopped all the acting, doing, serving, I would still now recognize my absolute need for “the other”…the poor, the immigrant, the prisoner, the minority, those whom society defines as “less than”.

Embedded deep in me is the lie that I am the one that others need.  We often consider "help" only as financial resources and leadership and education and skills and status/power that need to be shared around the world.  Yes, redistribution and sharing are necessary, but I believe God wants me to first understand my place of need, brokenness, humility, and powerlessness.  Several years ago, I sensed that God was telling me, "Laura, this is not about people receiving your gifts but about your journey to receive people as gifts.”  

This is a messy journey.  I know that I won't arrive until I'm on the other side.  But I do believe that spiritual power breaks in at precisely this place of brokenness.  What a beautiful vision to see Jesus as our restorer and reconciler; living in the way of all of us broken, all of us redeemed by Jesus, all of us deeply loved and valuable children of God.