At the Least Sound of Fear

Over the last few weeks the Leadership Team of the Mustard Seed (YEG)has been involved in a variety of discussions regarding future development and our current services.  Much of the dialogue has been stimulated by careful observation and an emerging awareness of a shifting landscape.  Those shifts are happening in the community and the community of services which support individuals and families impacted by poverty.  Books we read, speakers we hear and a persistent internal witness challenge us to examine our assumptions and practice.

We recognize that we live in a tension between the desire to help and the danger of harmful helping.  Steve Corbett’s excellent book “When Helping Hurts” has challenged us to think about “alleviating poverty without hurting the poor”. We grapple with the impression that we may be contributing to homelessness by the choices and services we offer and we engage a “healthy self-suspicion” around our motives and our actions.

I would suggest that this is exactly what we should be doing.

Incredibly in the midst of all this thinking, questioning and dialogue the ongoing wonder of transformation is all around us.  We could despair and cease to work, paralyzed by our personal and organizational insecurities.  Or we can determine to continue to put ourselves into the mix and see what wisdom emerges.

I have to say my work over the last 12 years or so has required unshakable faith in God and courage each day to encounter and tell the truth about a disparate world.  My faith and courage however are consistently dwarfed by the courage of those I have had the privilege of supporting and knowing.  Each day thousands of Albertans experience homelessness, violence, exploitation and hunger and each day remarkable people put their feet on the ground and engage with our brothers and sisters in the simple and profound act of caring. 

I carry my own share of the anxieties I have described.  I live with many of you in the tensions of an “us and them” society.  My day can end with more questions than answers.  Wendell Berry is among a handful of authors who have impacted my thinking and my stance in recent years.  I offer his words of comfort to those who live where I live and walk on my path.

“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
― Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

Dave Grauwiler is the Executive Director of The Mustard Seed, Northern Alberta


Email Dave  or Twitter @davidgrauwiler