I really like Marlena, but that doesn’t mean she is a good person. She is smart and easy to talk to, but only if you are talking about her stuff. She is attractive and has her hair done every week, but every month she asks to borrow rent money. She loves her kids, but she lies a lot and has taught them to do the same. She’s been through more houses, jobs, men, and resolutions than anyone I know, always looking for a better deal. So then, even though she clearly understands and openly embraces what our little fellowship is about, it is easy to wonder how long she’d stay with us if our friendship wasn’t such a bargain.
Lately I find myself wondering about that bargain, about whether the ‘grace’ my friends and I give our neighbors here is anything like the real thing. I mean, on one level offering our love without condition to broken people in a hard place sounds like a righteous thing to do. Moving into this neighborhood to establish genuine friendships across seemingly insurmountable barriers of race, class, and culture sounds more authentic than just dropping in to establish food, clothing, medical care, education, or housing programs.
For someone like Marlena, however, I wonder if our unconditional friendship isn’t just another program after all. When she comes over for a loan or asks Marty or I for a ride to the doctor, we generally treat her the same way we would Ric or Karen next door, who are our ‘real’ friends. It doesn’t feel the same, though, partly because Marlena is in no position to return our favors, and partly because so many of her immediate needs are caused by amoral, ghetto decision-making we would never tolerate in a real friend.
On Monday, for example, she called me sobbing just as I was preparing the game and a little five-minute talk about the value of community for that night’s fellowship dinner. “I just got a call from my son’s baby-mama. The girl he’s living with now stabbed him three times last night! He’s in the hospital there and he might die … Oh Bart, I told him to quit that girl! I’m going crazy here!” I began to comfort her like a pastor, but she cut me off. “Can you use your computer to help me and Shonda get plane tickets to Newark tonight? I’ve been calling my family to borrow the money, but nobody seems to care enough to help … but if I come up with it, will you buy them for me?”
Remember, we don’t have a program here, just relationships. Marlena and I are supposed to be friends. So, before I headed to her house, I called my travel agent and put on hold a pair of $170 tickets, leaving three hours later out of Louisville, 100 miles away. On my way over, I called Marty to see what she thought I should do.
“What choice do you have?” she said. “Marlena knows we have that kind of money, and she knows we’d buy those tickets if it was our kid having open heart surgery tonight. If she’s really our friend, we have to help her.” She paused. “Now remind me again why we do this?”
You see the problem, don’t you? I mean, it is no big deal to help a friend when she finds herself in trouble after doing everything right. It’s a whole different thing, however, when your friend has no money because she quit her job after the boss disrespected her, bought a big purebred dog she can’t afford to feed, and drinks more beer in a week than you drink in a year. Or when her own family won’t help her because, well, they’ve all burned each other too many times. Or when the son she’s crying over has two kids by two different women and is freeloading off a third, who probably didn’t stab him for no reason. Or when the daughter she’s taking with her has already told you she doesn’t want or need a man to help raise her own babies when she has them. In other words, when this kind of ghetto drama is bound to just keep on coming.
And yet, help her I did. I bought the tickets with the fellowship’s credit card, not knowing if or when we (meaning you too, if you’re a supporter) will ever get paid back, and I got one of our young single guys to drive Marlena and Sonya down to Louisville, and I knelt on their front steps to pray with them before they left. Now, a few days later, Marlena’s son is just hanging on, and so is my confidence that I really know what I am doing here.
Giving grace? Maybe. But if it is grace at all, it certainly isn’t the same kind that God gives. God, after all, is no sucker. He may make all the goodness in the world available to anyone who wants it, but as far as I can tell, you have to actually want that goodness in order to actualize it. God makes the first move, over and over until you respond, but it takes two to tango. The gift is being shown the way, and being allowed to learn how to dance in good company, so you show up in shape for the party.
I like Marlena, but that doesn’t mean she is a good person. I gave her my friendship, but she hasn’t earned it. Now what?
Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist who speaks, writes, and blogs about grace, faith, loving relationships, and social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship in inner-city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission Year, which recruits committed young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the U.S., and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.
