Working in the Gray

In my previous career, I was a mechanic. For about 10 years, I worked at various shops working on cars, heavy trucks, and forklifts. There was a certain beauty and simplicity to the whole process of working on a machine. It was broke, you fixed it, and then everybody was happy. Although it had its challenges, the end goal was clear and you knew you achieved it when the machine worked like it was meant to. But the machines did not talk back to me, so I decided to change careers. I wanted to fix broken people. So at 27 years of age I went back to school for a decade and then started working with people.

I miss the black and white simplicity of being a mechanic. Machines are either broke or fixed. Success is easy to judge. For the past 20 years, I have worked in the gray. People operate at points along a continuum of pathology (or vitality, from a positive point of view). In working with people, the end point is not always clear; you just know it is somewhere to the right of where they started. Success is often hard to judge. After your efforts of helping, sometimes things get better, but sometimes things seem unchanged or worse. In the later case, maybe your efforts contributed to making things worse or maybe they will ultimately be helpful, but it will not be evident in the short term – you often will never know. With improvement, you get to hug each other’s necks. When things don’t seem to improve, you get to question and second-guess. Helping is that way.

Yesterday, S. chose to return to homelessness. We tried to help. Now we just get to be sad.

Perhaps in the kingdom, to help and love is the end in itself and not just the means to success.  Godspeed, S.