A Vision for the Work

Our church has spent the last few weeks in prayer and fasting, and as I have prayed over these forty days God has seemingly been silent when I’ve asked him what I should be doing in my work. Looking back, I think this is because he isn’t asking me to do anything at all — he is asking us to do something. When I switch from “me” to “us,” I begin to finally feel the whisperings of the Holy Spirit, and I wonder if what he is asking us to do is to become a people of restoration. I can’t get past what I’ve learned over the past few years: that poverty is horrific, that people fall through the cracks, that the world is more broken than I could have ever imagined — that I am more broken than I ever could have imagined. What I have learned is that our human compassion is not big enough, our systems not pervasive enough, to do everything that needs to be done. But God is big enough. God is pervasive enough. And our God is in the business of restoration. 

A while back, someone prayed over me a ministry that looked like a teaching hospital. I was watching Grey’s Anatomy at the time (I stopped around season 9 — so many episodes!), and I loved the idea of a hospital that not only healed people, but taught people how to heal people. I love the idea that we can become a team, working with the power of the Holy Spirit, who are in the business of restorative healing. I love this for many reasons, but one of them is that it doesn’t ever assume perfection. When something is restored, a home or an armchair or a body, it holds traces of the pain it experienced before. Our job is never to fully fix, or to neatly fit people into a box that allows us to pat ourselves on the back. Restored things always keep their old flavor — they’re just made whole again. The process of restoration is slow and sometimes tiring, and it is never about creating our own glory from scratch. It’s about looking at the person in front of us and asking God to move, even in a small way, so that they can experience a deeper well of goodness. 

I am tired of thinking of my current job in a programatic way. We run ESL. We run Immigration Counseling Services. But that doesn’t tell you anything about what we do. What we do is create space for healing, for restored spirits, minds, bodies and hearts. This is both spiritual and practical work; those two cannot be divorced. Just as a good doctor knows that holistic care is necessary for true healing, we must understand that God moves in education and paperwork, in prayer and conversation, in good food and laughter. If what we do becomes just a program, we have lost the plot. What we do on this holy ground in Columbus, Ohio is create space for restoration; to make room for the Spirit of God to do something new with all of this brokenness. 

This brokenness is not outside of us, either. In a teaching hospital, we know that we are also in need of healing and hope. What we find is that, in choosing to serve those who have gone through hardship and pain, we are offering up our own pain to be healed, as well. We come with flaws, with grief, with heartbreaks that sometimes feel irredeemable. But we also come to this place to be restored. There is no one in this place who is above or below another; we come as equals, mutually seeking something that often cannot be found outside of these places where brokenness dwells. It’s funny how, as much as we try to run to pleasure to escape our own hurt, where we most often find healing is in the valley, with those who have, quite often, been even more wounded than we have. We are in the business of reciprocal restoration — we are all here in need of something much deeper than we can provide for ourselves. 

And so I move forward in this work holding onto this little idea: that we are not a conglomeration of programs, but that we are, in the end, a people creating space for restoration. We are running a small, makeshift teaching hospital, where serving and learning are all tied up in the same place, and where we ourselves are as equally restored as those we serve. We are not in the business of fixing things ourselves, and we are certainly not in the business of perfection. Mostly, we are here to love, and be loved — for love, as we know, covers a multitude of sins (1 Peter 4:8).