The Margins

“Even though something is commonplace, do we really need it in our lives?”

With that question in mind, all sorts of things were up for grabs: buying a house in the “right” school district, needing two incomes, cell phones, minivans, and even (hold your breath!) signing our kids up for soccer. It was like a little compact fluorescent light bulb turned on to illuminate some of the chains of conformity we had allowed to make our decisions for us. We began to see how deeply we’d bought into culture’s code of success being equated with more and more. The results of all this “more” were clutter and confusion and so we decided to simplify our lives. Removing some of the typical suburban clutter was a bit scary, but over the course of a few years, it really has begun to make room for life.

We soon discovered the joy of having fewer bills to pay, fewer trips to make, fewer calendars to juggle, and fewer agendas to manage. Lurking amid the resource of free time, we discovered the pleasure of not just having neighbors, but of knowing our neighbors.

From Chad Hall at Out of Ur 

I am struck today by how inadequate I can feel in my ability to truly offer my thanks and gratitude to those who give so much to me and to my family. A few examples come to mind:

After two long and I am sure exhausting weeks of helping us out, my mom left last night to return home to Seattle. For two weeks she has risen with the sun to start the day with Mercy and Aaron; she has cooked more meals and washed more clothes and dishes than even she could have imagined; and she has patiently and lovingly served me throughout my not always easy recovery. How do we adequately honor her sacrifice and servanthood? Those simple words, “thank you”, can feel like such a small thing to offer in the face of so much love and generosity.

We saw a friend today who has consistently chosen to love our family with astounding generosity. I have learned much from this friend and her husband about what it looks like to have access to resources and yet to hold so loosely to them. In a culture of so much accumulation and hoarding, they have been a witness to us of another way to live. We recently received a gift from these friends that was the answer to an outrageous prayer whispered with mostly disbelief that such a thing could come to pass. As I sat with this friend this morning, I was struck by how impossible it feels to say thank you for their kindness in sharing our family’s burdens as if they were their own.

And lastly, when we found out that I would once again face a six-week recovery period where I would be restricted from lifting my big kids, one of my friends here responded without pause: “Sign me up for two days a week!” This is the same friend who has tirelessly shopped for us, who has spent two days a week at our house (and sometimes three!) the entire span of my bed-rest period, and who always made sure we had enough fans when the heat got bad, etc. This is also the friend who is herself displaced from her home right now due to a remodel and who leads the board of a non-profit while running our church nursery and hosting monthly block club meetings. And all of this on top of being a great mom to a busy two-year-old. When I think about all that she gives up and the ways she chooses to inconvenience herself and her family for the sake of serving ours, I again find myself speechless. There are not “thank yous” enough.

In thinking about this, I was struck by how worship feels (or should feel). Do we regularly experience worship as a time and place where we are left speechless in the face of generosity and sacrifice that is incomprehensible? And do we know how to experience this together, as a community, a people, and not as an auditorium filled with dimmed lights and closed eyes and lots of individual reflection?

I guess the harder question even is whether our entire lives as Christians are marked by this awareness, this recognition of what we have received? And too, what are the ways that God wishes to be thanked? Singing songs where we say “thank you” is certainly good, but it dare not stop there. There is a way that those whose debts are forgiven live differently because of it.

A good friend stopped by the other day to meet Baby Elijah. She fundraises her salary to work with our Servant Partner’s internship program, and during her visit, it came up that she had lost a few donors in the last couple of months and that she was facing a critical lack in financial support to continue her work.

I have heard similar stories from more than a few people who serve through para-church ministries in recent days. Just this past week I read of a blogging friend’s situation where he and his wife are seriously reevaluating their ministry commitments as a result of diminishing financial support for their work. From a purely anecdotal perspective, it does seem to be a trend of sorts: either folks are giving less to what has traditionally been considered “missions”, or they are shifting how and where they do give. My friend, Jamie writes this reflection on the shift:

I started doing some digging and found that one major factor for the drop has been that churches (and people in those churches) are giving more towards their own missional endeavours, thus not giving as much to outside missionaries, organizations and projects. As many people believe that parachurch organizations exsist only because the church isn’t doing all it is called to do, the result is that few feel they have any responsibility for the well being of those groups or individuals. And so missionaries everywhere are seeing this decline.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying people are selfishly or callously cutting us loose. I am excited to see churches and Christians owning their missional role in the Body of Christ. While I might argue that we need to find a way for these too often alienated groups (local vs. para) to work together for a mutually beneficial solution, this does not seem to be happening at this stage…

I too have seen an exciting shift in churches that are eager to rediscover the centrality of mission; churches that for years viewed mission as something that others did that they supported from a distance through monthly or annual checks. I agree with Jamie that churches today are much more likely today to spend their financial resources in ways that involve and equip their own members in mission rather than give to one of the many worthy para-church organizations in their community. This certainly raises questions regarding what the future holds for mission and para-church organizations like those my friends represent, and those who have given themselves vocationally to serving through them.

The same day that my friend shared with me about her financial shortfall, I received my monthly newsletter from Bob Lupton, a leader and innovator in Christian community development in urban Atlanta. In his essay, he takes the idea of the Hippocratic oath in the practice of medicine and claims that Christian workers among the underpriviliged, “helpers” as he calls them, should take a similar oath to “do no harm” and refuse all ministry practices that build dependency or erode dignity or provide short-term benefits with no means for long-term sustainability. His article is provocative and I believe fairly condemning for much of what we do under the guise of “mission” today. He writes:

For centuries the Hippocratic Oath has served well the medical profession and countless millions of patients. It has guided physicians toward astounding medical breakthroughs as well as constrained them from endangering patient welfare by risking questionable treatments. Perhaps a similar type of code would be useful to those who wish to serve the poor. We know that helping can certainly be for better or worse. Even as a misdiagnosed ailment will lead to improper (even harmful) treatment, so wrongly given assistance may well prolong or even worsen the plight of the needy. Good intentions and kindhearted spirits, while commendable, are insufficient guarantees of positive outcomes. Unexamined service that risks leaving the served worse off than if they had been left alone is irresponsible if not unethical. Guiding principles are needed…

While we cannot foresee all the potential consequences of our service, we should at least make some attempt to predict their impact. Are we luring indigenous ministers away from their pastoral duties to become our tour-guides and schedule coordinators for our mission trips? Are we diminishing the entrepreneurial spirit in a culture by offering our free services, gifts and grants? Are we supporting irresponsible lifestyles by indiscriminate giving from our clothes closets and food pantries? Before we embark on a mission venture we should conduct an “impact study” to consider how our good deeds might have consequences we never intended. As Hippocrates admonished: above all do no harm.

Lupton’s article made me think about some of the potential effects (beyond the vocational ones being felt by my friends) the shift away from para-church support in favor of more church-centric mission could have. If resources that previously went toward funding long-term “missionaries” in communities are shifted toward financing lots of people engaging in one-time and short-term mission “experiences” (what I see a lot of churches doing as their primary way to engage their membership in mission), I wonder about the impact on how communities are served. Lupton continues:

The poor we serve may be quite reluctant to reveal “the whole story” to would-be helpers for a host of reasons — fear of judgment, fear of losing support, not wanting to appear unappreciative, intimidation. It would be very difficult, for instance, for a pastor in a poor Guatemalan village to tell a supporting church in the States that it would be a far better use of their money to help him create jobs for the men in his village than to spend it on plane fare to send 30 unskilled volunteers to come and do construction work for them…

I remember when I was working at North Park University leading a campus outreach to urban youth in the community, I would butt heads with certain administrators over whose experience was more vital in determining what we did and how we did it: the college student’s or the neighborhood junior high kid’s. Ultimately, the administration wanted their students served, and that was to be our program’s overarching goal. And thus the butting…

I feel like for a lot of churches, the same kinds of situations can arise where communities are served in ways that reflect more about the needs of congregants than those of the communities being served. And so thousands are spent on plane tickets for a week instead of being given to support a worker making a long-term commitment to serve.

We have been home for almost one week with our newest addition, baby Elijah. Mercy is a tender, doting big sister who likes to hold and kiss and cuddle her baby brother. Aaron is a mixture of proud and intrigued big brother with a healthy dose of “what about me?” and “what would happen if I do this…” thrown in for good measure. While Mercy loves to tuck Elijah’s blanket nicely around his little feet, Aaron would prefer to cover his head and face with it. And while Mercy loves to gently rock Elijah’s little bouncy seat, Aaron is very curious about how such a device could be used as a catapult. It is a good thing the seat has a little seaatbelt on it for sure!

As with most things Haub, this birth was far from uneventful and was not without some frightening complications. Elijah was a big baby. None of my OBs had felt like he was especially large, but there he was, a week early, weighing in at nine pounds, nine ounces. One of my favorite quotes of the day was from my OB who delivered him: “Doug, Erika, meet your one-year-old!”

As a result of the difficult delivery, my hospital stay was close to a week and once again required blood transfusions and the longer road to recovery that that implies. I am doing my best to get lots of iron (spinach at every meal–yum!), rest, fluids, and of course to spend good time with all of my little ones. Aaron and Mercy are doing an exceptional job in handling the ways I am still physically limited, and Aaron has actually taken to squeezing my mom’s nice Bath and Body Works lotion onto my feet and legs and giving me little massages, saying: “for you to feel better!” Truly priceless.

My mom and dad flew down for the birth, and while my dad had to return to Seattle last week, my mom remains here doing a super-human job at loving kids, cleaning and cooking, and caring for me. Doug is trying his best to balance work and good one on one time with Mercy and Aaron while bearing the brunt of the post-feeding night-time walking and shushing and changing of the baby. He’s a great dad. And he’s really, really tired.

Mercy turned three this past week, and in the midst of the chaos of new baby and my recovery, she had a very special day indeed. A birthday waffle breakfast courtesy of her auntie Anna, princess balloons from her Pop Pop, and lots of presents made for a great celebration. A dear friend had sent a box to us filled with gifts for Mercy (and a birthday card) for Doug and I to have to give to our daughter. This friend had wondered about the timing of Mercy’s birthday in relation to Elijah’s due date and felt like maybe the way she could bless us would be to shop for gifts in our stead and have them wrapped and ready to give to our little girl. When Mercy’s birthday morning came, I cannot describe how glad I was for this friend’s thoughtfulness and I had tears in my eyes as I watched my daughter twirl around the room in her new, perfect pink tutu and “crown” of flowers that “we” had given to her.

As Doug wrote in the last post, we named our son in a way that honors what we have learned to be true about our Father in heaven this past year: our God IS the Lord, and he IS a resolute protector and guardian. For Elijah, that has been true from his earliest days inside of me, and it remained true up until the very final moments of his delivery. Our beautiful baby is truly a testimony to God’s “resolute protection” in the midst of every dark shadow that threatens to cover us.

Doug always takes a photo of the view from the window of our room at Good Sam at some point when our children are born. There is a great shot that he took this time around of the cross that adorns the hospital building, and it mirrors photographs we have taken from this hospital before. Only this time, next to the cross, there was a bird that hovered and sat, watching us, throughout the day. A falcon or hawk of some sort, the bird was beautiful to watch and his presence felt to me a source of comfort: an expression of watchfulness, of guarding. It is the perfect photo to document Elijah’s birthday.