the deserving poor... and other labels

I have poison ivy on my ankle, a small inconvenient oozy souvenir of the weekend spent in Cherokee. Michael and I went to meet my work camp family. Forty one years ago we met for ten weeks to build a church in Cherokee. This year we met for three days. Our friend, Deweese Wolf, found two women in his extended family who needed help. As always, the helpers became the "helpees" as we shared our lives with these women and they let us in to their lives at their most inconvenient oozy places.
Lisa was the mother in the first home, a brick home overlooking a spectacular view of the mountains. She lives there with her oldest son, 20, her youngest son, 16, and a granddaughter. She is divorced from her alcoholic husband. Every morning, six days a week, she gets up at three a.m. to be at work at the dialysis center by 4 a.m. for her twelve hour shift. Her 16 year old son has a tumor on his knee and they are in the middle of a diagnostic process for him. Her request was to paint her trim work on her home. We couldn’t see the trim work for the piles of garbage in her yard... 29 large construction grade trash bags later, we had made a dent but not much. Our ecologically correct list said to recycle the cans and glass but that list did not last when confronted by the task of separating year old baby diapers from three year old cans. We didn’t have the time, or the stomach, for the job.
The values of our raising were spilling out like the garbage itself as we worked. How could some one live like this? How can you just throw carpet and diapers and storm doors and cans and half filled bottles of liquid and empty canning jars out in the yard and leave them to rot... or not? How can you live in a house that mirrors the outside with piles of trash? Are we doing anything that will be a true help or will it be the same mess in six weeks? Does she deserve help? Is this a waste of our time?
Campfire conversation was lively that night. We are a group of social workers, a chemist, ministers, Sunday school teachers, educators, communication specialists. Our first judging instinct that found Lisa wanting came under the microscope or as Claudie says, "Let me give you a new perspective". Why were we there in Cherokee..what was it in our Christian faith that pushes us to be the ones who help pull oxen from the ditch? And, do we have the right to be the judge of the stupid ox who got stuck in the ditch? Or, is our need to help, regardless of the proper designation of "deservingness", a mirror of the Grace that found us when we didn’t deserve it either? I have been "graced" so I am called to grace others without judgement.
The truth of the matter is none of us are deserving of what comes to us, be it good or bad. No one deserves twenty million dollars and no one deserves to die at sixteen with a cancerous tumor. My Bible says in old fashioned language none of us are worthy. Now I want to be clear...I don’t believe we are pond scum, worms waiting for the heel to grind us into oblivion. We are unique wonderful creations who give our Creator great pleasure. But, the Divine Comedian also made us imperfect. We are not mirror images of the One who gave us life. So, we all have garbage piled high in the yards and homes for our souls. Jesus said that the first stone thrower must be without sin. Ooooops! That puts me in a different place... a new perspective, Claudie. Now I can live in a place of compassionate reality. My questions are still there... how could someone live in the midst of garbage... but they are tempered with the memory of her face and her voice as she came home from a twelve hour shift to pick up her son and go to pick up her granddaughter at daycare.
My garbage looks different but it is still garbage. There is grace enough to go around for all of us who wear labels. Shiftless, white trash, dirty Indian, ADD, OCD, rich, poor, Christian, Hindu, New Ager, lazy, hard worker, whore, drug addict, mother, father, murderer or saint... we are all God’s chillun and none of us, no, not one, deserves the grace we are given. Thanks be to the God who sent us Jesus, the model for compassionate realism, a judge with mercy who tried to teach us the balancing act between grace and judgement. Name your garbage, claim it, go forward and try to sin no more. Selah.