Bringing Out The Worst
Moments of clarity come at strange times. Sometimes that clarity isn’t new clarity, it’s just gotten lost in the mire for awhile.
I was responding to an email from a prospective NeighborLink Network member who was looking for more information about what it took to start a NeighborLink in her community. She asked the question, "what happens if you can’t do all the projects?"
My response was full of the realistic project statistics and standard commentary about how it’s about relationships and not projects. All right and valid stuff. But, I kept going and shared about how NeighborLink actually brings out the brokenness that no one wants to fix, can fix, or there are resources to fix in a community. So, the more you work on fixing, the more you expose.
NeighborLink has the pleasure of bringing out the worst of a community. Hard to sit with that.
"What does NeighborLink do?" Well, we expose the worst housing related issues in our community that stem from a lot of other broken community issues. Sounds great, huh?
As I wrote that, it made my soul hurt even more. I’ve felt the heaviness of NeighborLink for quite a bit lately. Every time the phone rings and it’s a bigger need than the last or a need I know just won’t get picked up, I ache. I lament for a day that NeighborLink no longer needs to exist. A day that I know will probably never come.
This reality that we’re exposing the physical illustrations of the brokenness of our communities is a mixed bag. It’s good to bring the darkness to light and begin to recognize that there is something wrong and we should be doing something, anything, about it. It’s painful because it’s broken and full of complex issues that have to be addressed before it can truly be fixed. And, to fix it, it may take months or years of dealing with the symptoms before we can get to the root causes.
Pray for our communities. Pray for the neighbors next to you. Pray for your friends and family that you know are going through difficult times. Pray for those in dark times that there may be light to shine in it. Despite the pain in exposing the need, fixing won’t begin until then.
