Sobriety on Aisle 4, Next To The Pens

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She had spiked hair, looking a  bit edgy for a woman in her late forties, but full of spunk and charisma. Her smile was contagious, and I needed to catch it. I was having a rough day – I had overslept, and woke up with a migraine. Then I arrived at work to be met by several frustrating emails and canceled appointments. It was looking like it was going to just be one of those days.

I was at the office supply store, picking up printer cartridges and post-it notes. I often volunteer to run to the office supply store – there is something about the rows of pens and notebooks and folders that speak to me – the static energy. all the potential for creativity just sitting on the shelves.

So, there I am, at the check out line. I make a pile on the counter – legal pads, pens, printer cartridges (can you tell we are an org ran by creatives?) – and Phyllis was acting like it was her mission in life to make sure I had a pleasant encounter. Being a natural Eeyore who was having a Terrible Rotten No Good Very Bad Day, I was resisting it with all of my powers.

She asked if I had a rewards card, and she pulled up our account by our phone number, because, of course, I had long since lost the card.

“Love Wins Ministries”… she mumbles to herself, as if dragging up a memory. I stiffen a bit, as not everyone  loves church folk, and our battle with the City last year made us lots of friends, and a few enemies.

She snaps her fingers and looks at me, “You are the biscuit people!”, she said, referring to our distributing food on Saturdays and Sundays in Moore Square – a project we have done for almost seven years now.

I nod. “Yes, that’s us,” I reply, expecting her to say she saw us on the news last year when the City tried to stop us from distributing food.

She looks left, and then right, as if to make sure the coast is clear. Then she said, ‘I lived in Moore Square for a year. I was homeless and high all the time. I dug food out of trash cans and ate your biscuits and drank your coffee. Some weeks, that is all that kept me going. I owe you guys so much. You are the best!”

I laughed and said, “It seems like things are better for you now.”

“This past January, I have been sober two years. Things are so much better when you are sober. Harder, but better.”

We chat a few more minutes, and then I take my change and go to leave. As I am walking out the door, she hollers, ‘Keep doing what you are doing!”

As I walk to the car, I say out loud through streaming tears, “I will, Phyllis. I will.”

Managing by Mistake

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We are working on an internal document at work, a sort of Love Wins 101 for new hires, and I thought I would share some it with you over the coming weeks. Keep in mind this is first draft, so expect tense errors, etc.

When people come to work at Love Wins, it can be a bit confusing at first. For one thing, we don’t hand you a lot of rules – instead, we talk about roles and responsibilities and community expectations. After all, we are pretty clear we are less an organization and more of a community, and while an organization aspires to efficiency, we operate on the basis of  affection.

One example of that is our very conscious decision to encourage you to make mistakes. In fact, you are more likely to be fired because you did not make enough mistakes than because you made one.

As an organization, we tackle homelessness by assuming people who are experiencing homelessness have agency – that people prefer to choose what they do with their life, and that the thing that keeps us from doing what we want with our life is often the resources and relationships available to us. So, we see our role to provide those relationships and resources. We don’t think you are any different.

The thing is, most of the places I have worked in my lifetime, I did not feel like I had agency. I had to dress a certain way, clock in at a certain time, do the forms a certain way, request permission to do the most inane things, file a form to request permission to spend money that I would then have to file another form to request to be reimbursed for… it is soul killing. Or, it was for me.

So when I began assembling the team at Love Wins, I was certain that respecting people’s agency was going to be important. So, instead of investing time on the front end, creating a soul-killing list of procedures and structures designed to remove the element of choice (and the possibility of magic), we instead expect and anticipate mistakes, and spend the time on the back end, discussing the mistake and learning from them as a community.*

In my twenties, I was a salesman. Early on, I bid a job that should have been over seven thousand dollars at two thousand. The client, far savvier than I was, jumped on it. And we had to honor it, and lost our shirts. I went to my boss, the founder of the company, and told him about the mistake. I then handed him my letter of resignation, because I fully expected to be fired. He laughed, and said he could not afford for me to leave, since he had just spent five thousand dollars educating me on how to bid a job.

That stuck with me. And I never lost money on a bid ever again.

But it is more than just good for the employee and their agency – it is good for the organization as well. When you have freedom to make choices and exercise your agency, miracles can happen. There are now many different possible paths to the goal, whereas if I hand you a prescribed procedure, there is only one, and it is one we had developed without your input. You now bring your creativity, your experience, your genius, in the old sense of the word, to bear.

But don’t think we are encouraging chaos, however. Instead, we are committed to the end-state – or, as Stephen Covey says, we begin with the end in mind. Practically, that means we tell you what the desired goal is, and then we make sure you understand the goal, and then we agree on the things we have committed to  – end dates, resources, etc.  And then we leave you alone.

It is your responsibility to state your needs – and ours to provide resources and relationships to enable you to keep your commitments. And, so, you will make mistakes. And that is ok. In fact, you had better make mistakes, or else you are not trying hard enough.

*Most mistakes are not fatal. Some, however, are, or could be. So for those very few situations, we do have strict rules – sexual harassment policies, employee safety procedures, etc. But they are few and far between. Generally, we agree with Thoreau, who said “that governs best which governs least.”

Young Democrats Tweetcast

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Wake County Young Dems
Tonight, I spoke to the Wake County Young Democrats about the work we do at Love Wins Ministries and specifically, the fight to share food from last year we affectionately call Biscuitgate.

I am thankful they invited me out, and they live tweeted my talk. Below are the highlights, as posted on the Twitter. They are posted in reverse order.

If you would like me to come speak to your group (I am looking at you, Young Republicans!), send me an email to get the conversation started.

Why I’m Not Giving Up Social Media for Lent

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Last year about this time, I announced I was “fasting” from social media for Lent, because I was worried about the place it held in my life. What I discovered, as I related here, is that as much as I hate the ways in which social media interferes with my life, I hate being disconnected from my friends even more.

In the last year, I have thought long and hard about social media and how it affects me, and here is what I have come up with.

I am fortunate enough to know many, many people, some of whom I am very close to. And some of those I am very close to, I only get to see face to face every 2-3 years. But because of social media, I know their kid’s names, I smile with them when the kid gets a trophy or award, I see the movies of the dance recital. It is not the same as being there, but it is also not the same as not. It is a pale imitation of presence, but beats all to hell the alternative.

A dear friend (in the old school sense of the word – I have been a guest in their house, have played with their kid, preached at her church, eaten with her many times, I know what her favorite breakfast is) – went off Facebook a while back, And while the fact of my friendship did not change, my experience of it did.

I did not know how she was. I did not know if her job hunt was successful. I did not know what her daughter, who is a character, was up to, or how she was doing in school. I did not know how the dance recital went. I would find myself, driving down the road, worried that she was ok. In short, I missed her.

Because she lives in another state, it is not uncommon for a whole year to pass between our face to face meetings, but the interconnectedness I felt as a result of the social media interactions served as a sort of stop-gap measure  not quite face to face, but not the alternative, either.

And the alternative is the problem. Yes, I could have written her. I could have called her. She could have shot a video of her kid, put it on YouTube and emailed me the link. All of those things could have happened. But they didn’t.

There was a popular meme floating around Facebook a while back that said something to the affect of, “Remember before the Internet, when you took a picture of your food, you had to have it developed and then snail-mail copies of it to 1500 of your closest friends in order to let them know what you had for dinner?”

Of course we did not do that – but once social media became popular, we discovered we wanted to do that. We wanted to stay connected. We wanted to know that she was delighted her husband grilled these steaks for her, which was a treat after the hard week she had. And because of social media, we can know that.

Yes, there are the self-absorbed, whose mantra seems to be “Look at me!”. But those people exist in real life, too. And in real life, we ignore them, and leave the room.

In short, social media is a means of connection, just as real a means as calling or letter writing. It  is a tool, just like a stamp or a phone handset, morally neutral and waiting for whatever use we put it too.

And when I like it best, I use it to stay connected to those I love, to strengthen the ties that already exist and to forge new ones.

And, while I am a crappy mystic, I mostly know the experience of God in relationship. I am not denying there are other ways to experience God, but I have rarely experienced God in those ways.  I primarily know God as Love, and Love requires an object.

So, when I withdraw from social media, I am, in effect, withdrawing from my relationships. Which feels an awful lot like removing myself from the Devotional life.

Which is why I won’t be disconnecting from social media this year for Lent. Because social media is not a thing which interferes with my devotion to God, but a thing which enhances it.

Some follow up thoughts:

  • I hate Facebook as a tool. But I like what it does. Which is why I did not discuss the merits of individual tools in this post, but rather the effect of social media as a whole. I look forward to the day when we have better tools to do what the current social media players do poorly now.
  • I recognize there are unhealthy ways to use social media. But there are unhealthy ways to use a Chevrolet, too. And yet, we generally find cars useful.
  • If you are unable to use social media in healthy ways, I encourage you to do what you need to do to take care of yourself. I am merely describing my situation here, I am hardly telling you what you should do. 

Q and A – Do You Feel Guilty?

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I answer questions weekly on the blog that people ask. You can get your question in by clicking here. 

Someone who works with economically disadvantaged women writes…

You talk a lot about honoring people’s choices and have mentioned that many of your friends who are homeless sleep outside. Since they are your friends, I assume it bothers you, knowing that you are warm and safe and they are outside in the cold. How do you cope with that? Do you feel, somehow, guilty?

Response:

I get asked questions like this a lot. I know the question seems like it is about justice, but I think this is really a question about agency.

Look at it this way – Suppose you had a friend who was morbidly obese. You are friends, you spend time together, have similar interests. And you know that, unless something changes, your friend’s life will likely be shortened because of his weight. How do you cope with that?

Most of us have no problem coping with that, because we make some assumptions. We assume he has some degree of control over his choices. We assume he knows he is obese, and that if he needed help from you, he would ask for it. We also assume it would be rude and presumptuous to try to fix a problem in his life when it wasn’t asked for. In short, we assume he has agency.

However, we often have trouble coping with people who are outside because we want to take agency away from them. We don’t think it presumptious to want to “help the poor”, and yet never ask people who are poor what would be helpful. Often, our help is limited to what we want to “help” them do. Help is defined by us.

So, when I can’t do what I want to help them do – be inside, in this case – I feel impotent.

But if I am only valuable to my friend who lives outside because of my ability to help him accomplish the goals I have for his life, I am a pretty crappy friend. In fact, I would say I am not a friend at all.

I don’t think I am so important that, despite the fact my friend has survived 15,000 days without my help, I am all that stands in his way of surviving tonight. I don’t think I am so brilliant that I have answers to how to fix his life that he has not thought of. I don’t think he was praying last night, “Dear Jesus, please send a white man to take away my power to choose so I can be like him.”

What makes me a good friend to my friend who lives outside is the same thing that makes me a good friend to a person who lives in a condo – shared time, shared experience, shared goals.

So, yes it does bother me that some of my friends are uncomfortable, but because I am their friend, I honor their choices and their ability to make them. Because if I didn’t do that, I might be lots of things, but their friend is not one of them.

How Much Things Cost

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Note: I first wrote this piece on my old blog in March of 2011. For some reason, it has been on my mind lately, and I thought I would repost it today, three years later. I know the posts have been overtly personal lately, I will get back to Jesus and such soon, I promise. 

For the record, despite what the kids at school called me, we were not “white trash”. We were “poor-but-proud”. As near as I can tell, the main difference between the two categories had to do with the fact that we owned land. In any event, when I was a child we had very little money.

Through the end of the fourth grade that wasn’t all that big a deal. After all, all of my friends were in the same boat. Plus, I went to a small “Christian”1 school, where I don’t remember anything ever being said by my peers about what we wore.

But in the fifth grade, the closing of that school meant I had to go to the consolidated public elementary school. No one at East Tate Elementary wore jeans from the dollar store2 . All their jeans had names on them – Lee, Levis, Sergio Valente. And the shoes…no longer could you just wear plain old sneakers. Now there was Nike, and Puma and Adidas and Kangaroos (they had a pocket!). And all of those things cost money. Money we did not have.

I begged my mom to buy me a pair of Levis. “Just one pair,” I would say. “I will wash them every night.” But no. Every August we would buy five pair of cheap jeans that were that horrible, very uncool dark indigo blue color. And we would buy them a size too big, so I could grow into them, because we both knew there would be no buying new ones until next August.

My mom was an ardent scavenger at yard sales. And she knew I wanted those Levi jeans. And then, one day – Jackpot! Mom came home from the sales, Levi jeans held aloft triumphantly. Sure, they were slightly faded, but that only added to the appeal. The next day, I proudly put them on, shirt tucked in so all could see the telltale Levis label.

I made it till the second recess, after 4th period. That was when one of my persecutors informed me that unlike his Levi jeans, mine had a white patch on the right rear pocket. In other words, they were girl jeans.

Oh no. Dear god, no.

I cannot imagine a more horrible discovery. As I write this 28 years later I still feel the anguish and pain that went through me as he and his friends stood around me, pointing and chanting. “Girl’s jeans, girl’s jeans. Hugh’s wearing girl jeans. ” One of them said that since I was wearing girl clothes I must be a faggot. This was a new word I learned that year.

I raced into the bathroom, where I hid the rest of recess. I untucked my shirt, hoping to cover the offending label. But my hiding it made it worse, and for the rest of the day, the kids rode me without mercy. Through the remaining classes, people looked at me and giggled, pointing at me. And if I got up to sharpen my pencil, displaying the offensive tag, the laughter was so loud the teacher had to tell everyone to be quiet.

When I got home that day, after the longest bus ride ever, I hid those jeans in the bottom of my closet so I would not accidentally wear them ever again. My mom bitched constantly about how I just had to have a pair of Levis, and there she went, spending her hard earned money on Levis and did I wear them? No sir, I did not. “You are just ungrateful, Hugh. You just have no idea what those things cost.”

But I did. I knew how much love my mom put into searching the yard sales so she could buy me a pair of jeans I did not need, but desperately wanted. I knew that her buying me those jeans was my mom’s way of saying “You matter to me. Your happiness matters to me. You are worth the trouble I am going to to try to make this thing you want, happen. ”

And because I knew all of that, there was no way on God’s green earth I was going to tell her she bought the wrong thing. And I have still never told her why I quit wearing that pair of Levi’s.  I would rather her think me ungrateful than for her to feel shame or to know she caused me pain. I did not want her to think her love for me was, in any way, flawed.

After that, she refused to buy me name brand anything. That was the last pair of name brand jeans I owned until I was 15 and working and could buy them myself.

Which is why I tear up every time I hear this song from Dolly. Because I know what it is to have someone wish they could do more for you. I know what it means to have the love your mother gave you be laughed at. I know what it means to be rich in love. And I know how much some things cost.

{fin}

Notes:

1. In the Deep South after desegregation, Christian schools were often the result of white parents removing their children from public school rather than have them attend school with black children. Churches all over the South set up private schools to meet this “need”. I grew up in a county that was 70% black, yet I never shared a class with a black child until I was in the fifth grade.

2. Back then, a dollar store was not a store where everything costs a dollar. Rather, it was along the lines of a Dollar General or a Big Lots. I think most of my clothes we bought new came from Freds.

Neighbors and Loneliness

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We moved into this house in February of last year, which means we’ve lived here a year now. Overall, we love the house, and I love having a garden and a front yard to plant things in. The house came with tenants in the small apartment in the basement, which has been its own set of issues, but they do pay most of the mortgage for us, so there is that.

The hardest part about us living here, however, has been the lack of, to pick a better term, neighborliness. Our neighborhood was built in the late 1950’s as a black, working class neighborhood. The current residents are either survivors from that era, which means they are in their 70’s or 80’s, or they are renters, who live in largely unmaintained properties that they can rent cheap.

The older folks are great, but tired. Some of them marched in the 60’s and fought for school integration. I was at a city meeting once, sitting beside a lady in her 90’s who lives on the street next to mine. The speaker said something (I forget what, honestly) that got applause, and she shot her hand up in a black power salute. She’s great.

The renters are divided into two groups – those who have lived in the same rental for 10 years or more, and those who are just passing through. Those who have lived here forever pay under-market rents, which means the landlords don’t have the money (or the incentive) to fix the properties up. The transients are just passing through, so they don’t invest any time in the neighborhood.

We moved here for a multitude of specific reasons – It was the right size house for us, it was convenient to my work, it was very affordable, the neighborhood surrounding this street is improving, with younger families moving in. But one attraction for me was the idea of neighbors.

Since moving to Raleigh seven years ago, I have been one of the transient renters, described above. I have lived in, counting this house, five places in seven years. I have lots and lots of friends and acquaintances, scattered across this city, but no neighbors. No next door neighbor who gets the mail or checks on the chickens when we are gone, no one who sees you in the yard and stops to chat.

To our left was a vacant lot when we moved in, that I speculated on buying eventually. It had been vacant for over 60 years, but within two months of our living here, it got bought, and a duplex thrown up on it. More renters. The owners were nice, and we liked them, and they assured us they were hands on folks, who would be by often. Then they moved to Michigan and became absentee landlords.

To our right is a four unit apartment building, that when we moved in had two young working class black families as tenants. There were kids everywhere, which honestly, made me pretty happy. They were gone within six months, to be replaced by a passel of urban youths who moved in and took to having beer parties late at night in their front yard. Then they were evicted and the place sat largely empty through the winter.

The owner just sold it, and now it’s being renovated. The new owner is spending money he does not strictly have to spend on it, so I am choosing to see this as a positive. What makes me happier is that he is acting neighborly.

He saw me working in the yard, and came over to ask me about the project I was working on. He asked if I had had problems with the tenants in (now) his building in the past. He gave me his number, and asked me to call him if I had problems in the future. He asked my name, and remembered it.

The next time I saw him, he asked my opinion on the trees that were overhanging his roof, and I pointed to some that were overhanging mine, too. I said I wanted to cut them down, but didn’t have a ladder tall enough, or the help.

“Let’s do it this weekend,” he said.

So Boris and I spent yesterday afternoon cutting down and trimming trees, on both my property and his. And I was damn near giddy. Afterwards, I gave him some extra eggs from our chickens, to say thanks. This is hardly the epitome of neighbor co-operation, but it is the closest thing I have had in almost eight years, so I will take it.

I just hope he doesn’t move to Michigan.

Note: As I read back through this, I think it feels like I am complaining. I’m not, and I am not resentful of the folks who lived in the neighborhood before I bought this house – I am the stranger here. And things are better every week – people who spend money on their yard are a rarity in this neighborhood, so I am getting lots of interest and conversation as I work in the yard.

That said, I am really hoping that the people who move into Boris’ building have something in common with us. Because despite the fact that this street is filled with people, sometimes it feels very lonely.

Weekly Wrap Up

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This is what my week was like… Tell me about yours in the comments.

cold frame

IRL

It is that time of year when, we hope, the snow is over and the birds are beginning to sing. Which means it is time to start planting things. Last weekend, I built a new cold frame to start seeds in and to get a jumpstart on the season.

Most popular on the blog this week: 

A Q&A I wrote, answering the question, Do I have someone sleeping on my couch.

Books I read finished this week:

It was a fairly light week as far as reading goes – it is the time of year when a lot of my spare time is spent with my nose in seed catalogs.

Fiction

The Ranger - Ace Atkins

I first met Ace some 10 years or so ago, when I owned a bookstore and he was promoting his books. He is roughly my age, lives in a 100 year-old farmhouse, has been nominated for the Pulitzer, writes best sellers and all around makes me feel like a slacker.

Added on to that is that he lives near where i grew up, and writes about that part of the country, and it is a no-brainer I would read his stuff. He is also really, really talented.

The Ranger is his first book in a new series, and I wolfed it down.

Nonfiction

Daring Greatly - Brené Brown

She of the famous TED talk on vulnerability. I enjoyed the book and found a lot of it useful- that said, the last half was much better, IMHO, than the first. Something about her writing style grates on me.

Online articles of note

Online reading was sparse this week as well, but the following two things stood out to me.

The first was Life in the Nineties, by Roger Angell.

He is an essayist, and he is 94 years old. Those two fact collide in this honest, humorous essay about what life in your nineties is like. This is him talking about the death of his dog, Harry:

Here in my tenth decade, I can testify that the downside of great age is the room it provides for rotten news. Living long means enough already. When Harry died, Carol and I couldn’t stop weeping; we sat in the bathroom with his retrieved body on a mat between us, the light-brown patches on his back and the near-black of his ears still darkened by the rain, and passed a Kleenex box back and forth between us. Not all the tears were for him. Two months earlier, a beautiful daughter of mine, my oldest child, had ended her life, and the oceanic force and mystery of that event had not left full space for tears. Now we could cry without reserve, weep together for Harry and Callie and ourselves. Harry cut us loose.

Vermeer and the Threshold was the other. Vermeer is my favorite painter, hands down, and my one “bucket-list” item would be to see every Vermeer n the world with my own two eyes. It is doable, as there are only 39 of them, but since many are in Europe, it would also be expensive.

When we are fully absorbed in one thing, the rest of the world fades away. Music brings this out especially. Playing music can often be a process of “going in” to the music and then “coming back out” again. But every activity is like that to a greater or lesser degree: having a conversation; daydreaming; writing a letter; performing daily tasks and chores. And these are exactly the types of activity that Vermeer painted. In all of these paintings, human beings, women mostly, are shown in various states of attention, of self-awareness and of the immediate moments just before or just after becoming self-aware.

Let us call all of these moments “threshold moments.” Are threshold moments beautiful? Yes. Why? I don’t really know.

But it might have something to do with the following. We (human beings, that is) are a hovering kind of creature. We are never entirely outside of ourselves, nor entirely inside either. We experience moments of intense concentration, and moments where concentration is broken. We sometimes perform tasks with little awareness of what we are doing, and we are sometimes, especially at threshold moments, hyper-aware of ourselves and what we are doing. Subjectivity, to put it simply, is inherently strange. The core of the ego, the “I”, is a thing that hovers around itself, never fully apparent to itself, but never fully opaque either. We catch ourselves being conscious all the time. But what is the thing that is catching the other thing being conscious? It is impossible to pin down. And yet, daily life is infused with this process. It happens over and over again throughout our waking hours. We direct our attention to something we are doing, we begin to lose ourselves in the activity and then something happens, in ourselves or in the outside world, and the self-awareness jumps back in again. Vermeer painted these moments in their variety.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere

Love as a Force for Good – My regular Friday piece for the Love Wins Blog. Rachel Held Evans called it the most encouraging thing she read last week.

My monthly newsletter for Love Wins Ministries went out this week. My piece, We Want To Believe, was in it. (You could subscribe here, and get that in your mailbox each month.)

Well, that was me. What was your week like?