Agape, ‘Bandaids’, and Beloved Community
This is a portion of my speech from South Louisville Community Ministries’ annual dinner, Families Helping Families, on March 15th, 2022.
Two years ago, to the day, we postponed this event. I went from planning a celebratory dinner to a press conference in our building to respond as a city to the expected challenges we would face. We could not have known the toll the pandemic would take on us personally and on our communities.
In preparation for this event, I spent some time thinking about our accomplishments over the last two years, but I kept coming back to the extreme challenges. I’ve had to force myself to celebrate because I know that we couldn’t help every person. We didn’t save everyone’s homes.
Two days after Christmas, I received a text from a neighbor saying they knew it was late, but I was the only person they knew who might be able to help. I arrived around 8pm and it was completely dark, but there was a U-Haul and a few other vehicles with their lights on pointing toward the front yard. Their belongings were tossed about — much of it broken from being thrown from the front door — and after hours of ciphering through, they were still trying to find shoes, toys, and photographs.
The father told me he didn’t even know what he was looking for anymore, not really. He just didn’t know how to stop. He didn’t know what was next. There were two little children in the backseat of their car staring out, wide-eyed waiting for the next move. Pizza had been delivered by another neighbor so bellies were full, “but what about bedtime”, I imagined they wondered.
This had been my second sit-out someone called me about, asking me to help in whatever way I could. I had written an article about the first one, which was shared with more than 1,000 people. And months before, we launched stopmyeviction.org connecting more than 10,000 neighbors with resources and lawyers, but it was still happening.
Darryl and his family moved into a hotel. We bought them an air mattress for the kids to sleep on in the one room. I loaded up my car and we stored their lawn mower and clothes in one of the offices that wasn’t being used because of COVID. It took two and half months and many application fees later before we were able to write a check for a security deposit to get them into a new home. Two months of four people sleeping in a hotel room, getting up in the morning to go to school, doing homework and playing and watching TV — all on top of two mattresses. The whole thing was devastating, but… what if we weren’t there to share that burden? To quickly find a bed? To help store belongings? To find a new home? Maybe our job isn’t to stop a crisis or heartache, but to be there through it. To be a constant source of whatever peace and relief we can offer.
Now that’s not easy work. To listen to someone as they are losing their home. To give someone food while knowing that’s just the beginning of what they need. To spend hours on the phone with customer service so we can turn their water back on. It can quickly feel like a losing game. At least, that’s what I felt in the midst of the quarantine when there were so few wins and even fewer hugs.
I thought, if I’m going to do this for years to come, I’m going to have to adjust. Turns out, we are not going to solve poverty. We are not going to solve racism or greed. No, that’s not possible. However, we can instead spend the rest of our lives trying to love each other a little more abundantly. And through that abundance, we can refill our own tanks so we can keep on refilling others.
What if we share a vision of a more connected, loving community? What if our attention and values kept coming back to loving our neighbors? I wonder if we’d have flags out on our front porch to show when people can come by for some food? Or if we would listen to more stories and there would be more stories to hear because people would know they were being listened to? I’m imagining meal trains all the time for anyone going through a divorce or a big project at work. And we‘d no longer worry about whether there will be enough because we know someone will help if we run out.
I remember the story of the long spoons from when I was a child. Everyone was hungry because they couldn’t get the spoon to their mouths because they were so long — or imagine if you don’t have an elbow that bends. You wouldn’t be able to eat anything at all! Until one day someone offered to feed the person across from them and they returned the favor.
I say all this because while we built better systems and served more people than ever imagined, the real power of this work is in that abundant circle of care. When people feel moved to write to us to say thank you or give us a review online it’s not because they just received assistance, but because they were “treated like family”, “felt no judgment”, “appreciated the kindness someone showed them that day”. That’s what people want to thank us for.
And we will not carry on like we did the day before. To commit ourselves to that abundant care is not a way out of responsibility, but an invitation to think bigger, ask harder questions, and be an advocate as if it were for your family.
The real celebration is that we’re still doing this work while knowing well enough that poverty and crisis is not going anywhere. We’re celebrating a community that believes everyone deserves food and housing to such a degree that if we could keep one family in their homes, that would be worth all our effort. It does not look like we’ll be getting shorter spoons or elbows or whatever the metaphor is. Instead, we will *always* have to take care of each other, and that may be the best news there is.
