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What do you do when your idealism crumbles?

What do you do when your idealism crumbles?

Last updated on: November 18, 2015 at 11:03 am by Mission:Work

What do you do when your idealism crumbles? 2015-11-17T11:20:48-05:00 Mission:Work

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Q: How did you get to that place? You’re saving 97 babies in this one village, and yet there was that moment when you were thinking of the millions of people across the entire continent of Africa and realizing, “What was I thinking? How could I tell people we were going to change anything?” How do you develop that resiliency?

The process is actually a lot of grief. But I think that the journey has also provided a lot of freedom.

Freedom — a recognition of a very significant role that each of us gets to play in the world but that ultimately, it’s not on our shoulders. It forces us to stay in a posture of remembering who is God and who are we.

I wanted to be the savior. I wanted to believe that I could be the one to make the rain come or to heal people. So there was grief and a good dose of humility in that recognition.

I’ve been fiercely trying to hold true to the belief that even if it’s proximate, it’s worthy of pouring my life into it. The hope is that everybody else also takes part in their proximate responsibilities, so that we can watch this beautiful weaving together of all of the small things.

God is able to knit those into something very beautiful, and it takes away the messiah complex. It offers freedom. It puts me in a posture of great dependence and hope that the God of the universe is the one who is ultimately caring for the least of these.

It allows me to pace myself in a way that is more sustainable.

Q: You alluded to this earlier, but there was another low point, when Moses, one of your oldest, closest collaborators — someone you thought of as family — turned out to have been mismanaging funds, betraying your trust. What about that human betrayal? Did it take a different set of skills to bounce back from that?

It was wrapped in the idealism of this belief that Africans are hardworking and compassionate and creative and capable people to address these issues that we wanted to partner with them on. That was the story that Blood:Water was called to tell — and that’s the story we believe in today.

But what happened was, in that vision of wanting to tell that side of the story about Africa, I wrapped it in a romanticism that didn’t allow people like Moses to be human. The romanticism of partnership and committing and mutuality and all these things that were so important to me and the way that we built Blood:Water — that didn’t leave room for the human brokenness that’s true across the board.

That experience actually showed me more about myself than it did about him. It showed me I actually did a disservice to Moses by entrenching it in the romanticism of friendship versus treating him like a partner and having accountability or having clear boundaries.

If I hadn’t been so young and naive in developing those partnerships, I would have known that certain checks and balances are really important to do no matter where you’re working in the world, whether in your own hometown or across the globe.

I realize that if I didn’t have certain checks and balances in my own life, I wouldn’t follow those rules, and it would probably harm me and others. If there’s no speed limit set, then I’ll drive as fast as I want to.

Q: Just to clarify, presumably you’re not saying you’d steal money if you were given the opportunity.

Yeah, I would hope not. But I don’t know, because I live in a culture where there are so many standards. I’ve thought a lot about it, and with Moses, I understand what it feels like to be in a position where you’ve given up a whole lot on behalf of other people.

He was a really savvy businessman who could have made a lot of money, and he was putting in so many hours and was so sacrificial, and he made such a difference in these communities. I could imagine this little mental slippery slope of, “I have worked really hard. Five dollars here, $10 there, it’s totally OK, because I’m putting a lot in here.”

And then it just — so I could see that for myself in the same way, working 60, 70 hours a week for a nonprofit and starting to justify why a little comfort here or there is worth it because I’ve given so much. I actually was able to put myself in his shoes a little bit, or at least understand how something like that happens.

Q: It’s interesting to me how often, when you read stories of embezzlement, the story starts with people making an innocent mistake but realizing that no one caught it. Then they think, “I’ll temporarily borrow this, because I’ve got this payment due, and I’ll put it back.” And it snowballs.

I actually think that’s how it happened. I don’t think he set out to say, “Oh, a young girl — I’m going to take advantage of her and trick her. This is going to be a great moneymaking partnership for me.” I think he is actually very grieved by the break in the relationship between us, more so than the money.

I really used to believe that everyone had the best of intentions, and I just don’t think that’s true anymore. It’s not just through my experience with Moses but also in understanding my own brokenness.

That’s a shattering reality, to have to readjust the worldview where you think you and everyone else you’re interacting with is motivated by the good. And most people certainly are, but it’s — we’re all really broken, and so you have to take that into account.

Q: And yet even with going from this naive high to this crushed low, you’ve persevered. What advice would you give to folks who maybe are struggling with these same issues? Do you have any thoughts that you would share with them?

It’s important to evaluate what our internal definitions of success are and ask ourselves whether they give enough space for the stops and starts. Accomplishment has to absolutely mingle with failure.

Am I willing to stay with it even if I don’t ever in my lifetime get to see the fruit of the labor? In a lot of ways, for leaders, what’s challenging today is that everything around us has an instant gratification — has an immediacy — to it.

If we’re in the business of cultivating the kingdom in the form of lives or communities or the structure of justice or whatever it looks like, those things take time. Like I say in the book, really think about this “slowly by slowly” approach and do not be discouraged when things take longer than we expect.

I think of this example of these babies in Lwala — that’s a success that wouldn’t have been true if I had given up six years ago. I have no idea what another 10 years in this one particular community might look like if we stay with it.

The challenge for all of us as leaders is to ask, “How are we pacing ourselves? How are we bringing people along with us to have the right kinds of expectations?” Again, to be hopeful and to have great vision for the change that we can see and the love that we can pour out, but to celebrate small steps along the way and not be dissatisfied if that big, ultimate goal isn’t reached in our lifetime.

Thirty years ago, AIDS was a death sentence. Ten years into it, it was still pretty much a death sentence for people in Africa; and 20 years into it, all of a sudden it started to change. And 30 years in now, it is a chronic disease that can be managed if people have access to the medication and the lifestyle that allows them to have healthy nutrition and clean water and income and counseling. This is a remarkable change.

I’m so grateful for the people who 30 years ago were in it, and are still in it today, and have helped shift that tide. It’s asking leaders what their 30- or 50-year hope is, and then how do you chip away at it one little moment at a time.

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