I've had a job of some sort since I was sixteen years old. I worked in a food court and at a record store (which definitely dates me), a hotel and a hospital, a law firm and a landscaping company. I worked in a jewelry store at a mall, in admissions at a college, and on some scaffolding during a summer job painting houses, but in 1993 I got a real job.
It was my first job out of college. I had graduated with a sociology degree, which I soon learned qualified me to do very little without an accompanying graduate degree. I applied for dozens of jobs, working and reworking my resume to try and make it appears as though there was a theme in my previous employment. However, placing "laying new sod" and "changing bed pans" under "having a vision for change" did little to inspire potential employers.
I had an inkling that I wanted to work in a place where my work made a difference and although I had no experience in the area of education or working with youth I applied to countless jobs that were posted as looking for "counselors", or "case workers" for at-risk youth. Eventually a small day treatment agency on the near south side of Chicago, which served students who had been expelled from the public school system because of their assaultive behavior, called me in to interview for the position of case worker.
I knew from the moment I applied that I was unqualified for the position and as I walked through the school door in my new blue interview suit I knew I had no business presenting myself as equipped to carry a caseload of emotionally disturbed and behaviorally disordered adolescents. After a very short interview I was offered a position, not as a caseworker but as an educator. With absolutely no experience working with youth and not a single education course under by belt, the director of this program asked me to take over a junior high classroom which had already seen three teachers come and go in the previous six months.
There wasn't enough money in the budget for books. I purchased pencils and paper with my meager paycheck and I soon realized that the reason this agency didn't care about my qualifications was that they had no real expectation that these students would ever be students at all. These young people didn't fit in the system. They were seen as too hostile to be trusted in the hallways of a junior high school, they were too behind and beleaguered to hold their own with their peers in a classroom and they had been passed around and passed by for long enough that there was no longer any pressure to pick them up and point them in the right direction because the system felt it was pointless.
These students were at this "school" and I was their "teacher" because nobody expected them to learn anything at all. Although I was elated to have a real job I knew from the beginning it was an act of injustice to hire me. These kids deserved someone qualified and these kids needed someone certified but instead they got me, someone who could make quick work of changing a bed pan and who could write a great blue book essay on why the underclass has become a permanent part of our economy. These kids needed more and deserved more than my moment of altruism and my commitment to optimism ...they needed a sustained commitment to justice.
Last week I urged you to cultivate the heart of God within you; to practice being present with other people's pain and to let their pain move you so deeply in your gut that you cannot help but move that compassionate feeling into action. I urged you to become like the Samaritan who was called good, who was willing to cross the road to help a stranger who had been brutalized and left in the ditch. (Luke 10:25-37).
This week I want to push you further and call you to look deeper into the issues that may have lead up to this man lying in the ditch. What made this man vulnerable to attack? Why did someone bully and brutalize him? What stereotypes existed that made it so easy for the first two people to walk past this man's pain? What excuses for inaction were underlying, what systems of protection were missing, what avenues for advocacy were lacking? And would you consider moving past compassion and beyond a one-time action, past altruism and optimism and into a life committed to correcting the systems that are failing.
