Our Present Informing Our Future
If this is a time for anything, it’s a time for honesty. Honesty with ourselves and with one another. With that in mind, I ask for your patience and understanding for this post because I want to layout honestly some of my own inner struggles as it relates to our work here at HELP.
Our response during the COVID-19 crisis has two directions:
How we’ve responded to the little things in the past informs how we are responding to this crisis currently.
How we respond during this crisis will inform how we respond to the little things going forward.
Past informing our Present
If you’re like me, there are more times than I can count that I’ve been driving, come up to a stoplight, and had someone awkwardly stare at me from behind a sign that says something like:
LOST JOB
FAMILY AT HOME
ANYTHING HELPS
GOD BLESS
And if you’re also like me, you’ve passed those folks by without much more than the 30 seconds of awkwardness at the stoplight. Or you may think about them a little later and wonder why they don’t have a job or what’s gone on in their life that would drive them to the corner to beg money--substance abuse, laziness, childhood trauma--the list goes on.
Or, like me, you may have found yourself leaving a local Social Services building after a day of work and happen to look around the parking lot to see folks dropping off benefits paperwork in their new Audi A8 or the flashy new Tahoe or Escalade. And I climb into my 1992 Chevy truck with no A/C (but blessed to have power windows), a little rust, and a lackluster paint job and wonder why I work so hard.
Unfortunately, my responses to these little moments had and continue to influence the way I respond to the crises I’m presented with every day at HELP, even in the midst of the unprecedented chaos of this pandemic. These little moments create a subconscious response--a habituation--for how I respond to things in the future. So if my response is continually like the responses to the situations above, then my subconscious habit becomes responding in the like.
But what if I could stop before responding and consider my habit? Are there ways that I can respond differently if only I would stop and consciously think about what I’m doing before I allow my subconscious habituation to take over? Could I actually alter the way I deal with these situations?
Present informing our Future
The short answer, thankfully, is YES. We can actually alter the way we deal with situations on a day-to-day basis. Paul tells his readers in Romans to “not be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of your minds” and this is just the process that we must seek. We must work toward transformed minds by the arduous and daily work of practicing transformative thinking. Like any challenge--becoming bilingual, learning an instrument, learning a new trade--it all comes through practice. If I practice transformative thinking often enough, it will become rote for me and will be my natural reaction--I will be habituated to transformative thinking.
So the next time I pull up to a stop sign and see someone with a sign:
LOST JOB
FAMILY AT HOME
ANYTHING HELPS
GOD BLESS
I must make the conscious effort to see a person who is wholly and dearly loved by the same God whom I claim to be my own. I must make the conscious effort to thank God for the ‘other’, regardless of how different their lifestyle or spending habits may be from mine. I have to renew my mind away from the way it’s been trained by the world and be transformed to see with the eyes of Christ.