When Even The Missions Don't Want You

Imagine you look around the place you have called home your whole life and you begin to notice that things just aren’t the same. The major industries have downsized. Young men and women are fleeing the area as fast as they can in search of jobs elsewhere. All that are left behind are the elderly who have nowhere else to go and the poorest of the poor who do not have the resources to go anywhere else.

You can’t help but feel that something needs to be done. Once upon a time you had been part of a prosperous community and the state had dipped into your cookie jar over and over again… but then your money dried up and now the rest of the state has forgotten you exist. Businesses that were once bustling are sitting empty. Houses are left abandoned and decay tears them down as the wild overcomes them and swallows them up.

Since no one else is offering you any assistance, you decide to start something on your own. It will be a new movement, for your people by you. It starts slow. In the basement of a church you labor for long hours, locked in endless discussions and meetings as you carve out a plan of action. Piece by piece your vision grows. When you began you had no idea what you were doing, but now you begin to see something amazing happen.

Soon, you acquire a piece of land no one else wants… and for good reason. The building is in poor shape and as you tour it, you can’t help but feel a stick of dynamite might be of more use than a can of paint. But, you draw upon your vision, and you set to work. Long hours, bloody knuckles, aching backs all conspire against you. You hold on, though—and slowly it takes form. Slowly, you see it. Slowly, your vision is becoming a reality.

You send word out that you have done this. And people begin to come to you. You host them in that once dilapidated building and you show them the once-thriving county you live in and together you help your people. You send the volunteers back to their homes a little wiser and they tell others about what they saw. More people come. Before long they are coming from all over the country to see what you are doing and to become a worker in your army against poverty for a few days.

Your vision continues to grow. You can’t help but feel proud and your chest swells every time you hear some Midwesterner who says their ‘O’s funny talk about your vision. You continue to work and labor, but now the thing is taking on a life of its own. Once it was like an infant that needed your constant care, then like a toddler that you watched learn to walk… but now it’s an adolescent, comfortable on its own two legs and eager to venture into new and unchartered territory. You step back and let it explore, but you know that it still needs guidance.

So, like a parent who knows when she is not wanted, you seek a guardian to watch over it and to help it continue to grow in new and exciting ways. It is still your baby. You still love it. You search long and hard, and you think you have found someone who will care for it. Someone who understands your vision, and understands this new life that is taking shape—someone you hope and believe will stay true to both things. Both a past and a future are required to make anything strong, and you watch breathlessly as it passes out of your watchful gaze and into the hands of someone you trust.

But then something happens. You don’t know what or why, but this vision you loved so dear begins to rebel. Before you know it, every value you hold is challenged. At every turn you are told that you are too old, too organized, to churchy, too this, or too that. This person you had trusted with so much seems to resent everything about you. And now, he wants to take your baby and leave.

You cry out over and over again, “Why?” But no one is listening. The person you had trusted doesn’t seem to care that you are confused, hurt, or angry. And the people upstate who had ignored you for so long are still ignoring you… so you are a lone voice calling out in the wilderness. No answers come. No explanations. Just one day you awake to find that your baby has disowned you, wants nothing to do with you, and doesn’t feel obligated to explain anything to you.

The home you had rescued from the decay of neglect and worked so hard to restore for your baby has been taken away, too. The workers who used to come and tell you stories about your baby, they are disappearing as well. You know they are still coming, but there doesn’t seem to be any desire to share stories with you any longer. You have become a piece of the past that your baby seems hell bent on forgetting. You, of course, wonder about the baby’s future because you know how important the past is to anyone’s future. But you have been forgotten. Neglected. Ignored. Just like every time before. What do you do?

What do you do when even the missionaries and missions don’t want you anymore? You knew that politicians, businesses, organizations, and just about everyone else didn’t want you—they abandoned you as soon as your gold mine paid out. But you had expected that you would always, at the very least, have a place with the missions. Especially the one you had built from nothingness into one of the strongest missions in the region. What do you do?

What do you do when all your pain and hurt are swept under the rug and ignored? What do you do when your confusion is deemed senseless and worthless? What do you do when no one will even show you the respect of explaining why you lost everything you worked so hard for?

You talk to the person you trusted with your baby—but he doesn’t reply. You talk to the board members who were supposed to keep everything under control. They shrug and seem to be as clueless as you. On occasion someone says “it wasn’t you, it was them” (the money people up in Charleston), but no one is ever able to tell you what “them” did that was so offensive.

You stumble in the darkness and the more questions you ask, the more protests you raise, the more you are alienated from everyone. The mission—your baby—tells you to get over it. “Them” tells you to move on. And no one will tell you why you lost your baby.

So, what do you do?

~~~~~

Every day I come to my office and my eyes turn to the massive building up on the hill—I asked to come to this place because of the organization housed in that building. It was a mission that began while I was an impressionable adolescent and it helped to cement my sense of calling. I would often read about the things they were doing, would hear stories about what work teams had experienced while visiting that mission, and I wanted to be a part of that movement. As I grew, so did that mission, and so did my infatuation with it.

By the time I was an adult, I knew that the Southern Coalfields of West Virginia was the only place I belonged. My college years were filled with titillating weekends spent exploring the narrow hollows and windy roads of these southern counties. McDowell, Mingo, Wyoming, Mercer—they were home for me. The further away I moved (as far as Colorado at one point), the more those ancient mountains called to me. As soon as I was able and ready, I went.

I drove into town, eager to go to work, eager to partner with that mission that had so impacted my life and my attitudes about Christian service. But soon I would find that I would not be able to work with the mission that had been such an influence in my life. It was in the midst of “disassociating” from the denominational attachment it had held since birth. That saddened me, but in the long haul didn’t make a whole lot of a difference. But questions kept coming my way… questions from people who felt they were being shunned by a mission they helped to build and questions from people from the outside who had been supporters but weren’t getting any answers. I kept shrugging and saying over and over again, “I don’t know.”

Over and over again, I asked what had happened, but every questions and concern just seemed to label me as an “enemy” when all I wanted to was to be a friend. Even as I sat in conversation with a board member who had supported the disaffiliation, I didn’t get an answer or a plausible explanation. Her chief response was that it had to do with the “conference” but there were no details or real explanations about what atrocity the conference had perpetrated that made a complete disowning of the denomination necessary. The more I push for a real explanation from her, the more irate she gets. Not wanting to end a good friendship, I pull back when I really want to throw my hands up and scream, “Someone owes us an explanation!”

And then I come to church one day and I am greeted by a person who wants to know what happened. “Why don’t they want us anymore?” he asks. And what can I say? From where I stand that’s the answer in and of itself. They don’t want us anymore. We aren’t worth their time or their effort anymore. So what do I do? What do I do when even the missions do not think my people are worth their time and energy? What do I do?

Organ Transplant? Only The Privileged Need Apply

Recently, a woman who has been on my prayer list called me with a heavy heart about a painful decision she has to make regarding her health and her chances of survival. “Beth” is in her sixties, has lived through the death of her husband and her only grandchild, and is now locked in a painful and long battle with cancer.

Because Beth lives in a rural Appalachian area, medical care is not readily available. She makes a six-hour drive up to Morgantown every few weeks to receive her chemo treatments. Fortunately she has family in the area that she can stay with since she usually does not feel up to traveling after the treatments.

Recently she was told that she could be placed on a liver-transplant list, but only if she moves to Morgantown. Should she choose to stay in Welch where she has made her life, where her family is, and where her home is, she would not be considered. Beth does not want to move to Morgantown since there is no telling how long she will have to be there before her shot at a transplant comes through. It’s been tough on Beth as she struggles to decide between putting her life on hold to live in the guest room of a relative, or to return home and hope for a medical miracle.

However after I got off the phone with Beth I began to think about many of the people who live in this area. Most of them do not have health care, unless they are on disability and can obtain benefits that way. Even so, they are locked in a black hole of poverty, so traveling long distances to get to the hospital is out of the question. Getting to Morgantown would be impossible. Much less moving to Morgantown.

It’s painfully obvious that organ transplant policies heavily favor the privileged: those who live in wealthier, more developed areas; those who have the means to travel; those who have the means to uproot their lives in order to wait on a transplant. But the poor, the disenfranchised, and the discarded people of rural Appalachia are left out in the cold (as well as many other segments of our society).