God is calling me to stop being a whiner. To be honest, I am not sure I can do it. I am not sure I can get over my neediness, or my self-centeredness, or my irritability, or my pride. But the calling is clear – God is trying to get me to see my circumstances in an entirely different light.
On one hand, I find myself at an uncomfortable juncture in my professional life. I am the part-time pastor of a dying church, one that barring a miracle will be gone in a year or two. They people here are sweet, faithful, devoted, loving – and they are old. Too old, mostly, to give much in the way of the volunteer effort or the money that might enable the church to reach out, minister, and grow. And so, we drift towards the end, with everyone in the church but me more or less in the process of ending their lives, even as the congregation as a whole ends its own. It is not the most inspiring set of circumstances.
Needless to say, I am trying to find another place to serve, but the reality is that when you’re young and single, you are not a hot commodity in the ministry world. It’s hard to feel like no church wants to hire me to do the job I have trained for years to do. It’s hard to feel like nothing I do in my current job will matter in the end. And it’s also hard to be pastoring for 90 bucks a week and trying to cobble other part-time work into a living. It’s easy, on the other hand, to get depressed and bitter. It’s easy to watch all my friends from seminary, who have wives/husbands and even children, who are ministering in successful churches, who are planning trips to Europe while I worry about paying the light bill all alone, and think I have been left behind. And it’s easy for my prayer life to become an exercise in whining to God to get off his duff and start blessing me already.
But at the same time, God has been making me think about the neediest members of society. One of the part-time jobs I’ve cobbled together with has been at the Texas Hunger Initiative, where we work to address the vast needs in the third hungriest state in the nation. We meet with community leaders, local government, businesses, and ministers to see how resources can be directed where they’re needed. We coordinate between local food pantries to get them on the same page. We march through the summer heat hammering in yard signs and passing out flyers so kids will know where to get free food over the summer. Sometimes it’s hard to know how much of the world we change, but I know it changes me. It changes me because I have to think about what life is like for someone who’s really struggling, and I realize that many, maybe most, are struggling more than me. In Waco, where I live, nine out of every ten kids – nine out of every ten – are in danger of not getting enough to eat. There are food pantries serving 700 families every week. And still, there are people everywhere that no one has enough resources to help. The world looks very different when you stop looking at it from the perspective of an affluent, educated American.
The more I am confronted by the needs of my neighbors, the more silly I feel about whining. I start to wonder if I have any right to complain at all. After all, I have never in my life been forced to miss a meal. I have a roof over my head. I am not living on less than a dollar a day, or a slave, or in prison for my beliefs. No one is trying to kill me. I don’t have cancer.
The truth is, my problems are real, but they are only major by the standards of a healthy, middle-class American. By the standards of the 38 million Americans who can’t be sure they will get anough to eat, or by the standards of the people living in the houses of the impoverished neighborhood I drive through to reach my little church, or by the standards of the people being blown up by artillery shells in Syria, or by the standards of basically anyone in the third world, my problems are kinda wimpy. My whining is predicated on the idea that I’m having difficulty achieving the lifestyle that “normal” people enjoy, but I’m starting to realize there is nothing normal about that lifestyle.
So God is changing my perspective on gratitude, and on what I truly “need” to be happy, and on what counts as a crisis. But maybe most importantly, God is changing my perspective on what is The Point of this life I live. It isn’t just about seeing my own problems for what they are; it’s about becoming burdened for the problems of others. I’ve been doing my devotionals lately out of the gospel of Luke. And I have to say – if you want to maintain a middle-class American, consumerist, individualist perspective on wealth and success, you really shouldn’t read Luke. Luke has Jesus pointing us over and over again to the poor, the outcasts, the needy, the disadvantaged. And suddenly, I get a whole different idea of what God is up to. I realize that improving my own circumstances is not and ever has been The Point. The Point is not to get more stuff, more comfort, more success. The Point is to serve Jesus, and him in the distressing guise of the poor. That’s what’s worth agonizing over.
In some ways. it doesn’t change what I’m going to do. I’m still going to look for a full-time pastorate, because that’s the work God has called me to. When I get there, I will most likely be firmly in the middle class of one of the richest societies the world has ever seen. But as I move on, I hope God will keep me focused on the marginalized, and on the places where there is real hurt – where the Church is called to minister. It is there we can find the heart of Jesus.
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