“So, what kind of success rate do you have?”
I am meeting with the pastor of a medium sized church, part of [Really Huge Denomination]. We are in a quiet coffee shop, drinking $4 cups of coffee while talking about poverty. Lucky for me, he is buying.
He asks me this question, I am pretty sure, not because he really wants to know, but because he is not sure what else to ask. In his world, there are numbers to go by – you divide the number of results by the financial cost and the result is how successful it was.
I try to tell him why the world I work in can’t work that way. When you are dealing with individual people, success is hard to quantify. I could tell him that out of maybe 50 people I have a relationship with, three have moved into more permanent housing this year and one of them has decided to follow Jesus, but that would have anything to do with Maria, who still prostitutes herself in order to pay for her drugs.
I don’t know how to put a cost ratio analysis on sitting next to a transgendered person as she cries because she is alienated from her family. Or being told by someone who has had ample reason to hate the church that she attended services last week for the first time in years. How do you decide how much to invest in someone who always lets you down, yet tells other people that you are the brother he never had?
Statistics are safe. Statistics are clean. If you hear that 20 people enter a job program and one year later, 15 of them are still working, that sounds nice – but it doesn’t tell you the struggles they endure to get clean clothing to work in, the challenges of finding a place to shower, the long nights of crying in the back seat of the car they are sleeping in as they battle the urge to drink.
We don’t deal in statistics. We deal with people. We don’t count heads, we count friends. Friends are messy. Friends are inconvenient. Friends let you down.
The pastor is less than satisfied. I understand. Most days, I am less than satisfied too. But if you are going to treat humans like they are made in the image of God, you have to let people make their own choices. If the only way you will spend time with someone is if they do the things that make you happy, then you have a pet, not a person.
Many professional homeless workers are in horror at this concept. They believe that I am rewarding bad behavior and as long as I am not strict with what I will tolerate, then they will never change.
I have a different philosophy. As a follower of Jesus, I believe that I constantly let God down, yet he has not given up on me. I fail again and again, yet am loved completely and without question. And even should I decide to go my own way and make decisions that harm our relationship, he honors my choices and would take me back in an instant. In fact, he would never stop pursuing me in his efforts to take me back.
It’s called Grace. It’s called Love.
And if the cross on Friday and the empty tomb on Sunday have anything to teach us, it is that Love Wins.