Before we get down to the nitty-gritty, I have to say two things; 1: To the four people who read this blog, I am sorry that I have taken so long to post. 2: I tried to write a post on this same topic earlier, but it is unfinished due to the fact that some things have realigned in my mind and what I would have published would have been crappy and come across as self-serving. No guarantee that this won’t be but we’ll see.
For the past two months, I have worked overnights in a group home in Maple Grove. It’s run by a non-profit company who has houses all over the city. I have 24 scheduled hours per week, meetings and training is paid time, and I can fill-in at other houses, which I have been doing recently. I have been working second shift when I work at other houses, which adds the challenge of a completely different routine to the challenge of working with individuals that I have just met.
The individuals that I take care of have various physical and mental disabilities, which are accompanied by often severe health problems. Or sometimes health problems cause the disability; it has been almost a month since one of the people at my primary house died of a degenerative disease I’d never heard of before I got the job.
It’s a difficult job: I’m not creating or selling a product; I am providing care for other human beings, which will never be an exact science. Sometimes I have hard time leaving work at work.
I wanted to write about my job because something is happening inside of me because of it. Maybe God is doing something new, or is reworking something that needed to be reworked, but I am seeing people differently than I used to.
You see for the longest time I have been incredibly uncomfortable with the handicapped, hospitals, nursing homes, etc., basically any place where people were in a different situation than myself. It’s not that I didn’t care about them, but I didn’t really want to be around them, which would make you question my intentions and heart, and that is perfectly fine with me.
Now I haven’t necessarily stopped being uncomfortable. Straight up honesty: I bathed an 84 year old woman this weekend, an activity that I wouldn’t have chosen had I been free to do so. I was incredibly uncomfortable, but early on in the job, I made a choice that I was going to do what was needed in order to properly care for someone, whether or not it was gross. It’s not about my comfort, but theirs.
Quite frankly, I really don’t want to be comfortable in my job. If I get comfortable with disease and death, with defect and deformity, if I get comfortable with the way things are, then I believe I will forget that our world is not the way that God wanted it to be. God does not want us to suffer, He does not want us to die; if I get comfortable, I fear that I will forget that.
Every time I go in to work, there is a reminder that our world is broken. The more I interact with people who are obviously vulnerable and dependent, the harder it gets to deny my own brokenness.
And in response to this, I choose to love. I choose to see someone who is just as needy as I whom I can lend a hand to. I choose to do gross things, the kind of things Jesus would do if he were in my place.
Hard jobs are a necessity because life is hard, but I think they also exist to soften us, to help us see ourselves for who we really are, and to remind us that when God says His creation is good, He means it.
