Sunday’s sermon was a hard one for me to hear. It started out comfortable enough, with stories about New Year’s Eve traditions and the way we frequently use the end of one year to reflect on what we have or haven’t done in the last and what we hope to change in the next. That warm fuzzy started to disappear when Justin got into Micah’s consistent theme about the failure in Israel to end injustice and pursue mercy as God had been commanding them for years. Through every chapter of the book there is a clear and unmistakable message that God’s people must practice justice and mercy and they must walk humbly with him, because he himself loves to practice both justice and mercy toward humanity. To be clear, it was not the basic concept here that I had a hard time accepting. For me, the idea of combating injustice and providing aid and relief to the needy is inspiring, and the thought of making a difference is thrilling. However, in my experience the practical reality of those efforts is that 1) it never makes much of a dent in the problem, and 2) it can perpetuate problems when you never have a complete picture of the issue you’re trying to address. Albuquerque is an easy place to see the need because it is on seemingly every corner and abandoned lot in the city, but the closer I have gotten to it the deeper the rabbit hole seems to go.

At this point in the blog it is pretty obvious I am not going to come out smelling like roses. I admit it; in the three and a half years since I came back here I am at the lowest point of my compassion for the needy of our city, just at the same time that I have done more service and gotten closer to the need than ever before. The unsettling part of it is that my heart still desires to be a tool of mercy in God’s hand, but I am absolutely undone by the challenge of continually doing his work in the real world. This is not an imaginary place where the city’s problems can be solved by a handsome, middle class white male stepping into the frigid gap with bumbling but good intentions, open honesty and a sudden moment of inspiration, and a final rousing call to action; this is a place where cause and effect are impossible to untangle, where love and unflagging loyalty might be a lifeline or they might be an enabler, and where deception and self-deception have been such constant partners that every new resolution to do better can only survive (minutes? days? weeks?) until the next inevitable crisis appears. God may indeed be calling his people to acts of service – or rather a life characterized by and identifiable as Christian because of its love and sacrificial service to its neighbors – but he certainly is not giving them the talisman of utopia to accomplish it.

I would love to tie a neat bow around this one and end with a key thought that resolves the ideas that are in tension in my mind. Since that isn’t going to happen, let me close with just two lessons that I have learned over the past year when it comes to answering God’s undeniable call to beat our fists and foreheads against the walls of injustice in our city. The first is that we are the body of Christ and we are never called to a life of lone wolf Christianity. One of the biggest reliefs I ever experienced was when I asked my fellow workers to hold me accountable to structures we had jointly established for what we could and could not do when asked for help. It feels counterintuitive that I experienced freedom from being constrained to boundaries, but the reality was that I was acting like a superman and completely burning out until they helped me find peace with doing only as much as I could and should do. There were still hard decisions to make, but now I was not the only one making them and sometimes I could even skip a new decision altogether by applying the existing guidelines. The second lesson is that the primary measure of an action is not whether it fixes the problem or not, but rather how well it matches God’s expressed will for me in that moment. Did I respond when God called me to respond? If yes, then I have answered his call, whether it provided a lasting, forever solution or just a singular act of mercy that tomorrow is buried under a new pile of pain. There are different seasons of the work God has laid out for us, and my capacity for service will inevitable vary with the season. In this real world where we live, God calls us to have faith, both in doing the works he puts in front of us and in trusting him for the results (visible or otherwise) that they may or may not achieve.

~ Arlen Biersgreen