Oh the Funny People!
They just made me laugh a lot today. And hurt a little.
A young guy called, hemming and hawing. "Umm, you know how, when a guy loses his job, and...he's withdrawing from drugs...umm, he just wants to be left alone, so he can sleep? If he came to stay at your place, would that happen there? No? uh, okay, bye then."
A man who has used a couple different parts of our services called. "Miss Pattie, hey, do you know the phone number for the big post office across the street? What's that called, just the Town Post Office?" I told him I'd try the government section of the phone book.
Then the man who stood in front of my desk. "What can I help you with?" "I don't know, they just told me to come to the front desk." He didn't know what he needed or who was going to help him - just that if he stood there long enough, someone would.
And the one who makes more money than I do but came in because there was no food in the house for his family. He wasn't interested in learning how to make a budget or showing his kids how to grow up differently than he did. He just is surviving every day.
The frustration of that kind of situation sometimes tempts me to make little of the stress and difficulty of these lives, coming from a social-Darwinism culture of pulling up by your bootstraps and easy judgment of those whose lives we cannot understand. But then I watch the faces of the people in front of me, their own frustration and plain old exhaustion of just making it, day by day, spending two hours to bring home a few bags of groceries or most of a day, or two or three, trying to keep their electricity from being cut off.
I can't imagine the strain of living in a world in which you don't know, don't know where the resources are, don't know what you are eating that night, don't really even know how to process all the information coming at you, living so in the moment because you are trying to survive and have never learned how to do it well, beyond tackling what is right in front of you to be tackled.
Yes, they could learn how to tackle these things in a way that would ease the strain. But I have been in situations myself in which there is so much heaviness already that making dinner, much less imagining a whole new way of approaching the world, was far too much to even think about. It even made me want to give up on the little I could do. Overwhelmed.
That's why I love working here, to take a little weight off the ones who are overwhelmed and also be there for those who can surface long enough to start heading for shore. It can happen. (Circles is one way it can, and one that is doing it well.)
And to be in those places that make me laugh.
A man called this morning looking for confirmation that he should go and work with missionaries. Huh? His job, as he sees it, is to go around to all the churches and tell them what they're doing wrong. I could have laughed and cried at that one all at the same time. I told him a pastor might be the best person to talk to. He told me I would receive the Holy Ghost because I had been gracious to him.
I laughed the hardest last week at one of my men. He came back from working the delivery truck in the morning watching his phone, which had been in his pocket. It was deleting photo number 3,000 and counting, out of the 8,312 that it had taken of the inside of his pocket during the morning! He looked a little bemused.
A young guy called, hemming and hawing. "Umm, you know how, when a guy loses his job, and...he's withdrawing from drugs...umm, he just wants to be left alone, so he can sleep? If he came to stay at your place, would that happen there? No? uh, okay, bye then."
A man who has used a couple different parts of our services called. "Miss Pattie, hey, do you know the phone number for the big post office across the street? What's that called, just the Town Post Office?" I told him I'd try the government section of the phone book.
Then the man who stood in front of my desk. "What can I help you with?" "I don't know, they just told me to come to the front desk." He didn't know what he needed or who was going to help him - just that if he stood there long enough, someone would.
And the one who makes more money than I do but came in because there was no food in the house for his family. He wasn't interested in learning how to make a budget or showing his kids how to grow up differently than he did. He just is surviving every day.
The frustration of that kind of situation sometimes tempts me to make little of the stress and difficulty of these lives, coming from a social-Darwinism culture of pulling up by your bootstraps and easy judgment of those whose lives we cannot understand. But then I watch the faces of the people in front of me, their own frustration and plain old exhaustion of just making it, day by day, spending two hours to bring home a few bags of groceries or most of a day, or two or three, trying to keep their electricity from being cut off.
I can't imagine the strain of living in a world in which you don't know, don't know where the resources are, don't know what you are eating that night, don't really even know how to process all the information coming at you, living so in the moment because you are trying to survive and have never learned how to do it well, beyond tackling what is right in front of you to be tackled.
Yes, they could learn how to tackle these things in a way that would ease the strain. But I have been in situations myself in which there is so much heaviness already that making dinner, much less imagining a whole new way of approaching the world, was far too much to even think about. It even made me want to give up on the little I could do. Overwhelmed.
That's why I love working here, to take a little weight off the ones who are overwhelmed and also be there for those who can surface long enough to start heading for shore. It can happen. (Circles is one way it can, and one that is doing it well.)
And to be in those places that make me laugh.
A man called this morning looking for confirmation that he should go and work with missionaries. Huh? His job, as he sees it, is to go around to all the churches and tell them what they're doing wrong. I could have laughed and cried at that one all at the same time. I told him a pastor might be the best person to talk to. He told me I would receive the Holy Ghost because I had been gracious to him.
I laughed the hardest last week at one of my men. He came back from working the delivery truck in the morning watching his phone, which had been in his pocket. It was deleting photo number 3,000 and counting, out of the 8,312 that it had taken of the inside of his pocket during the morning! He looked a little bemused.
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