Pressing On

I've written before about how this work we do is much more about planting and watering seeds than ever seeing a harvest. I don't think that was something we grasped before we came here, but it was a lesson we learned pretty quickly. 

Let me be quick to say (for those of you who work in traditional/church ministry) that ministry itself is messy. It just is. I've worked for years in women's ministry and local church ministry, and I've seen some of those messes firsthand. I don't discount that truth at all. 

But I will also say that in the types of ministry I've worked in before, the people I worked with showed up because they wanted to. At least most of the time. They came to church or Bible study or retreats because they had (at minimum) a curiosity about the Lord and (at maximum) a deep hunger to know Him more. We could dive in to learning fairly quickly.

This work is different. Ministry rarely looks like Bible study around here. To clarify, it's not that we don't study or pray or talk about the Lord with our tenants. It's just that ministry looks more like working through issues of the past that still linger so profoundly. It looks like teaching daily life skills (sometimes over and over again) in hopes that sometime it will stick. It looks like trying to share wisdom and hoping it will be received. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. And the messes of this kind of ministry are completely different from what I had ever seen before. 

So we plant.

We water.

And we wait.

Not long ago, I had an impromptu chat with one of our tenants. We do regular apartment checks around here - mostly to make sure they are living in conditions that promote health and safety, not conditions that promote exterminators and interventions. This is also one of the ways we teach some basic life skills that many of us probably learned from observing our parents when we were younger. But not all our tenants had that chance. So I'd done an apartment check and took some time to offer words of praise to our tenant for her excellent work.

I told her I remembered when we first came, just over a year ago, and so many of the things on the checklist were a major struggle for her. We would go in to find kitchen cabinet doors (uppers!!) just hanging open with no one around. Her clean clothes would be wadded in a heap on the floor of her closet. Every light in the whole place would be on, even if no one was home.

But this time when I checked, the lights were off, the cabinets closed, the counters wiped down, the bed made, the clothes on hangers, and she even emptied the lint filter. I had a little happy-dance party right there by the dryer when I found that!

I told her how proud I was of how far she had come. I reminded her of the things I used to have to mention and how much nicer the place looks now. 

That same tenant was talking to me another day and said, "Is today your laundry day? Wait. No. It's tomorrow, isn't it?"

I didn't even remember I had talked to her about my laundry days, and I said so. She then recounted for me the entire conversation about how I wash clothes on Mondays, towels on Thursdays, and sheets on Saturdays.

And as she repeated my talk, the Lord nudged my heart that if she can remember what I say about closing cabinet doors and when I wash my towels, she probably also remembers the things I've taught her about the Lord and about faith...even if she doesn't verbalize it. 

This is why (and how) we press on when the discouraging days hit. We listen hard to the things our tenants say and remind ourselves that they're listening and paying attention even if it doesn't always seem that way.

It also reminds us that they are literally always listening and watching, so our words and actions matter. How many times has something stuck with me (for better or worse) that I merely observed from someone? I'm filling our tenants' days with my random moments of words, reactions, and decisions. I won't even pretend I've done it all right. I know I haven't. But I'm convicted to keep trying and keep being aware, because eyes are watching and ears are listening.

It may not look anything like any kind of ministry I've ever done before. But I'm pressing forward and trusting that words of life will stick alongside words of how to make a bed.