Please welcome today’s guest poster, Joella Ranaivoson (’13).
Joella finished Calvin this May with an Interdisciplinary major in International Relations, Religion, and Writing, and a minor in Church and Society. She’s headed off to Calvin Seminary in the M.Div program, so in Grand Rapids is where she will remain for the next few years. In the meantime, her immediate family lives scattered across the Midwest, so she’s bounded from GR to Chicago to Topeka to Minneapolis to Iowa this summer to visit all of them. She’s stopped trying to pretend she doesn’t love words. Oh, she loves music, too.
I spent three weeks with twenty-five and then eight remarkable young adults, students who are going to be among those leading in the church someday. The first ten days, all twenty-five of the students stayed together as one body, sitting under the teaching of some remarkable professors at Calvin Seminary and asking all manner of profound existential questions I was surprised and thrilled to learn of their depth of interest and care for. The next ten days I spent with eight of them and one co-leader in the city of Portland, Oregon, where some very grave and wonderful things were changed in me, in all of us. But let me go back to the beginning.
This thing that brought us all together is called Facing Your Future, a program for students who have completed their junior or senior years in high school and have been called out by their church leaders in recognition of their gifts for leadership and ministry. The students apply, are selected for the program, and then must read in preparation for these three weeks together (authors including Richard Mouw, John Ortberg, Nathan Bierma, Ron Hall and Denver Moore, and Father Gregory Boyle).
For a week before the students arrived, the six of us adult leaders trained. The other leaders were either in the midst of or had recently finished their Calvin Seminary education.
From the first night the students arrived, we watched them sit in cohesive, large groups, bonding over games of Apples to Apples, refusing to split up into smaller enclaves. As the days went on, my delight in witnessing this grew to admiration as the togetherness continued.
The daily schedule of FYF included sessions, meals provided by a local CRC congregation, Space for God—time which they could spend alone with God—and small group. I had four girls in my small group. It’s something else to listen to the hearts and minds of four young women from three different countries and walks of life.
Sessions included teachings on the tenets of Reformed theology, “romantic radar,” vocation, family systems, the CRC Synod, and picking the mind of Dr. Neal Plantinga. Visits included a trip to the CRC denomination building as well as a day in Dearborn, MI at the Arab-American museum. We attended a mosque there and indulged in Lebanese cuisine to learn about Arab-American culture and Islam.
I met the end of the first ten days spent on campus with a bit of grief that this part was ending. But something else was coming, something else wonderful.
The students and leaders divided into three groups headed for three excursion sites: Austin, Texas, Roseland in Chicago, Illinois, and Portland, Oregon.
Our first few days in Portland, we saw the sights and began to learn the culture of Portland. My favorite of these early days was a Monday spent climbing a hundreds-of-feet tall sand dune beneath the bluest of blue skies and walking a mist enshrouded beach along the numbing cold of the Pacific Ocean. It was beautiful. My heart was light as cotton as we ran along the beach and played in the water, beckoning waves forth even as we ran from them, and watching the relationships between the students form and connect us to one another.
After the beach, we hiked a stretch of a mountain edge whose cliffs were buffeted by the blue and green of the Pacific. The second half of the group I hiked with took it easy, singing as we went, pausing every few steps for photographs, basking in the glory of it all. It was the richest experience of creation I could have asked for then.
Soon after, we moved from our host family’s to a bunk house with Bridgetown Ministries, the homeless ministry we would be partnering with for the next four days. With the guide of two interns, whom we came to respect and love dearly by the end of our stay, we leaned head-and-heart-first into learning about homelessness in Portland.
Day One with Bridgetown had us walking 4-5 hours in downtown Portland on a prayer walk and scavenger hunt. I confess, in the midst of the scavenger hunt all my “I will lead by example with eagerness and positivity” self-talk was draining from me as I internally grumbled, wondering why they had us walking so much on the first day. By the next day, I understood why.
That evening, the students had a scenario put upon them. Their parents had lost their jobs and now they were being evicted; they had five minutes to grab three things to take with them; no money, no electronics, no food. “You’re going to be homeless.” With those words, the tension in the room became palpable and visible in the students’ faces and bodies.
That night, with the knowledge that we were homeless (leaders, too), we did Walkabout with Bridgetown, giving pb&j sandwiches and hot coffee to homeless people as doors to conversation and relationship-building.
The next day, the eight students split into three groups each with a leader, and we spent the day being homeless. We knew downtown very well from the previous day’s walking.
What did we learn from being homeless?
People won’t look at you when you’re homeless; they refuse to make eye contact, as though you didn’t exist. How diminishing to a person’s sense of worth. That’s how I treated homeless people. A homeless person is not less of a person because he is homeless. Make eye contact, greet them, stop for a conversation, sit on the ground with them. Get over yourself, myself.
It could have been us. For some reason, God’s grace, I think, we weren’t placed in the very difficult, demanding situations that lead to homelessness. We don’t deserve not to be, and the homeless don’t deserve to be.
The homeless community in Portland is mutual, protective, together, even in the midst of the devastation wrought by being on the streets.
Homeless people are people, image-bearers of God, for whom Christ died. I am not better than them because I went to college and have a place to live. Anything that may repel us or cause us to turn away from them is sin in us, not in them.
The evidence of God’s hand and his Spirit moving through the city of Portland in the homeless community and the ministries reaching out to them sifted slowly through me, settling deeply in my gut. For it is true: God is for the homeless, the destitute, the down and out. So shall we be, too.
A stirring post, Joella. The concerns of the homeless have been on my mind more and more as my church works to reach the homeless in our area… there are no quick and easy answers, but I think that the right track is one that involves relationships, listening, partnering–like you’re saying. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, Jenn.
Fellow blogger Griffin Jackson just wrote an interesting post on his personal blog about homelessness.
http://griffinpauljackson.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/he-stepped-onto-the-train-and-i-just-knew/
He brings up a lot of the strange tensions I feel when encountering people who are homeless. Where do we draw that line of “too much” help? Is there such a line?
I understand about feeling the tensions and awkwardness of encountering a homeless person or any person who purports a need, but for all appearances seems to be not telling the truth.
I think, since learning more about homelessness, what remains for me is that the man Griffin encountered, and those whom we encountered in Portland–and any other person on the streets–he or she is on the streets for a reason, he/she has a story, whether or not it’s the one they’re telling strangers on the train or passersby on the street.
For me, what this experience showed and taught me was how to go a bit deeper; to sit with a homeless person and listen to what he has to say, beyond the spiel he gives to people going by, to refuse the invisible but pervasive walls of social standing keeping us separate.
Inaccurate as this sounds, even to my own ear, it isn’t always about ‘helping’. Sometimes the best help is to simply listen, turn your point of reference from yourself to another–hospitality. That’s another important thing–relationship is hard to do from a distance, especially in this context. You have to engage, interact personally, face-to-face, person-to-person. But be wise and discerning, of course.
I don’t know if there’s a line to be drawn for “too much” help. I do think there are ways of responding that aren’t ultimately helpful. But among the biggest things Portland taught me was how to not be afraid to go and approach a homeless person, ask him his story, not even from a “I’m here to help you,” position, but a “I want to listen to you” place instead.
Griffin’s story makes my heart ache on both sides–for the man asking for help on the train, and for those listening to him–because they’re–we’re– peering out at each other from both ends of a telescope. But that’s why it’ hard with no simple answers.
Is that helpful?