Some personal learning

I hate the expression, "out of your/my comfort zone." I don't like the implication of defined spaces. In and Out. Reflection of my approach to life? My thinking/learning style? I prefer the gray places, the fuzzy edges. I've never been completely comfortable with straight answers and clear-cut rules. Interesting the adjectives, straight and clear-cut. It was always one of my challenges as a parent, and one of the challenges in my second marriage. My kids seem to have survived. The marriage did not. But for other reasons and another story.

So, back to "out of your comfort zone." I understand that there is something about human nature, perhaps all of nature, that calls us to be where it's comfortable. We gather with people we know. We live in neighborhoods where others look like us and presumably have the same level of economic security and education as we do, and where our neighbors share (for the most part) our color, our values, our culture. We work to make our daily existence easy. We engage in "debate" with those who are like-minded. We listen to and read the pundits, journalists, publications that support our way of thinking, our ideals and values.

I am guilty. I can also defend and justify these behaviors on a number of fronts. I have begun to wonder more about what we/I lose by living this way.

There is something in biology or ecology about the richest, most vital part of an ecological system is in the edges. That is where the most biologically diverse activity occurs.

Whenever I have been in a new place and with people who, in my first glance, appear to be different from me, I have learned, grown, been challenged, stretched. Sometimes I have learned new things about myself, or come to admit things about myself that I had been able to deny previously. Always I have learned new truths, realities, and ideas.

Here is something I've learned recently as a result of my engagement with CI-UCBC and this first time in Congo. I have been guilty of objectifying poverty (and I hate even to name the it as poverty). In my comfort zone, within my boundaries, my safe, middle class (and evangelical Christian) context, poverty has been "out there." It is something outside my "comfort zone." As such, it has been easy to treat is as other, as an object. It is something to be solved, addressed. It is something to which I respond briefly and episodically. I can give money. I can give my cast-offs to it. Help out on a weekly or quarterly basis. I can even take pictures of it (for which I offer a public apology). Always, though, poverty is outside my comfort zone. Always I can and do step safely back into my comfort zone.

I don't think that Jesus said, "The poor you will have with you always," to exonerate us from helping the poor. I'm beginning to wonder about the other messages in this statement--the metamessages.

Perhaps this statement is an exhortation to be with the poor. To live among and with--and not just to be able to help, educate, contribute economically or financially. But to learn from and live in parity with. Scary thought. Very scary.

What might I learn from living in and among those who are poor, as defined by my experience? My community of middle class, Americans (including middle class, American, Christians)? That I'm NOT in control. That all I own is grass that withers in the sun. That peace comes not from my surroundings, but from my heart. That sufficient is enough, and, sadly, my definition of enough has been more than enough, it is excess. That death and life are constant realities. (Within my first 8 days in Congo, there have been 2 deaths in families that are friends and/or relatives within this tight knit community. And, as David Kasali reminds me, death is part of the reality of this place).

And once I've learned these and other lessons, how might I act differently? Live differently? How might my actions, my choices, my behaviors contribute to the common good rather than to my own? How must I act differently, live differently now?