Getting There

One of the most unique experiences I have had thus far at Ventana is working with the homeless in Santa Cruz. This past Wednesday I had the opportunity to hang out on Pacific Avenue, a short strip that encapsulates the best and the worst of Santa Cruz. We are given five dollars, intended to be used to buy someone a drink or meal, and are let loose to just go love on people for two and a half hours. It felt so unnatural at first to strike up conversations with a stranger, to initiate the avoided eye-contact, to say hi and not keep walking. However, each time it got easier, and each time I recognized more and more people. I have been able to establish relationships with people who I normally never come into contact with…How strange it feels to walk down the street in the heart of a foreign city and recognize so many people there!

Don’t get me wrong, the experience has not been any sort of boon to self-satisfaction in feeling generous and kind and loving. It has been a lesson in how blindly I walk through life, concerned with myself and too busy or self-absorbed to care about others.

Ventana is definitely not the ooey gooey feel good kind of ministry. It isn’t an enormous, extended spiritual high of yay me for choosing Jesus. There’s something about being in a consistent community of believers, all at similar places in life, that drags the worst of me to the surface. We experience intimacy of friendship that permeates the casual acquaintances our generation is so accustomed to. We get angry when we are angry and get sad when we are sad, something that makes sense on paper but is frowned upon in our stoic, rushed society. We break through the artificial happy faces and feel uncomfortably comfortable with one another.

My poor attitude flares up continually, my insecurities take on an air of jealousy and judgment, my self-satisfaction, my confidence in being a Christian is seen as it truly is—pride in my actions and choices rather than humble acceptance of the gift of grace. I am being reminded daily how far I am fallen from the perfection I fool myself into believing is attainable.

Yet I love it? There is something about the phoniness of society that never appealed to me. However, it is dangerously possible to go from one extreme to another, to regard the rest of the world as starry-eyed and idealistic, while in fact fooling yourself into believing you have risen above. The kind of reality here is not simply a more cynical disenchantment of looking into who we are, not the approach of the intellectual or the approach of the world-weary follower, believing they are the ones who truly understand Christ. It is more so the approach of the ragamuffin, undeserving of grace but aware and passionately grateful for it.

“More pleasing to Me than all your prayers, works, and penances is that you would believe I love you.”