by Jamie Wright
During my feline-enforced #quiettime, I kept coming back to a piece of advice I’d been given by several friends. It’s just one of those things you say to someone when you’re trying to be encouraging, but I’d heard it so many times, thinking about it made me want to jump up and run into traffic. (Thank God the cat was holding me down.)
Do the next right thing. That was their advice.
Seriously?
DO THE NEXT RIGHT THING?
Well, fuck me in both ears. Why didn’t anybody tell me all I had to do this whole time was “the next right thing”!
How blissfully simple.
I think most of us would love to do the next right thing, but what if, like me, you feel overwhelmed and paralyzed because you don’t know what the next right thing is? What if your life is actually super complicated, and you have lots of experience doing what you thought was the right thing only to have it end up being totally wrong?
I mean, maybe it would be more helpful if “the next right thing” was more specific, like “Eat the next right thing” or “Do the next right yoga pose.” But my life is more like choosing which direction to go at a fork in the road to Oz and less like picking breakfast off a Cracker Barrel menu. For the things that really matter, I’m gonna need a better slogan.
Forgive me, but I’d like a catchphrase that captures both the responsibility I feel to do good and the freedom I have to get it wrong. Because when I’m feeling stuck, which is kind of a lot, it’s usually because I’m paralyzed by fear of doing the next wrong thing. That morning, stuck to the floor by my rotten cat, I didn’t need a cute little meme to cheer me up and let me off the hook. I needed someone to tell me, “Do the next most practical thing after careful exploration of the facts, so that even if it turns out to be the wrong thing, at least you can say you made a solid decision based on sound research, and if after a period of evaluation you find out it wasn’t the right thing, then you can try something else. God will handle the rest.”
It won’t fit on a cross-stitch, but at least we can all sleep at night if things go south.
* * *
I will always be grateful for the experiences my family had overseas, and I can honestly say that most days I’m glad we went for it. The truth is, I feel pretty lucky to have lived the life I’ve lived, to have made the mistakes I’ve made, and to have seen the hard truths I’ve seen. Even the part where I earnestly tried to follow God to a faraway land to save the world but found myself in a club full of goobers and dickheads with a gecko in my pants was pretty amazing.
Costa Rica sent me home with a cat, two dogs, and a finely tuned crap detector. With keener vision, I’ve become more and more uncomfortable with exporting the lily-white Jesus of the North American church and even more convinced that God and the world deserve far better than what we’ve been throwing at them for decades. To be a complicit partner in a billion-dollar industry, to continue to show up, as we so often do, unprepared and ill equipped, to keep sending the wrong people to the wrong places to do the wrong things? This is not an option.
But neither is hiding at home.
To be perfectly honest, a huge part of me wanted to stay right there, safely stuck to the floor with Knives for the rest of my life; a disgruntled ex-missionary, permanently immobilized by the cat in her lap and the fear of becoming next year’s embarrassing Christian anecdote.
But that morning, while Knives snoozed, I realized there was actually something I could do and do well. In fact, I was already doing it. I had considered shutting down TheVeryWorstMissionary.com since technically I wasn’t one anymore, but I resolved to keep it alive and to continue to write about my eye-opening experiences abroad. I would do the next practical thing—and leave it up to God to forge a future and purpose beyond my wildest dreams.
I couldn’t know it then, but in the months ahead I would become an advocate for better mission practices worldwide, a journalist for humanitarian aid efforts, and a proponent of education and economic development in impoverished communities. Over the next few years, tapping into my truest self and doing what I do best would take me all over the world, opening doors I never imagined I’d have the opportunity to walk through.
But first, in order to move forward, I would have to look back and let go of the shame I carried from my own mistakes and missteps. I would have to trust our years in Costa Rica to God (who thus far hadn’t let me down), choosing to believe He wouldn’t allow even my worst best attempt to save the world to go to waste.
I would simply pursue the most practical ways to love my neighbor, care for creation, and, yes, make the world a better place. I wanted to do something with the knowledge I’d gained, so I decided to gather my courage, cling to the messy meme of practical magic, and rise to try again.
I mean…just as soon as Knives woke up.
In the beginning this was a story about how not to save the world, and it still is. I still have no idea how to fix a big, broken church. I still don’t know how to end global poverty. I still haven’t come up with a surefire way to heal the emotional, physical, and spiritual wounds of an entire planet full of diverse and dynamic people. Like, I have no idea how to do any of those things. (And to be fair, you probably should have clued in on that about, oh, I don’t know, like fifteen chapters ago? So that’s kind of on you.)
Don’t get me wrong, I have tons of ideas about how to improve Christian missions (most involve gasoline and a match), but the last thing anybody needs is another one-size-fits-all prescription for charging out into the world in the name of Jesus.
I am certain of only two things. The first is that when Jesus told me to love my neighbor, I’m pretty sure he meant, like, my actual neighbor—the person or people nearest to me at any given moment. At home. At work. On the subway. In the supermarket. On a street corner. Y’know, neighbors. And the second thing is this: The only way to know how to truly love your neighbor is to truly know your neighbor.
And that’s it. That is the single concrete conclusion I gathered from five years as a paid professional neighbor lover. You’re welcome.
The point is, I can’t tell you how to change your piece of the world, because I’ve probably never even met your neighbors. Obviously, they know what they need, so I would tell you to go ask them. Though I do wonder if maybe there aren’t still some questions you need to ask yourself before you go barging into unknown territory with your sword of righteousness aloft.
Anyway. Instead of a comprehensive how-to list, I’d like to offer you what I hope will be a little word of encouragement.
Relax. This isn’t gonna be weird. I have no intention of congratulating you for being made of stardust and unicorn farts. But I do want to leave you with something to come back to, should you ever find yourself buried in the avalanche of your own evolving faith.
* * *
While coming “home” provided relief from the daily frustrations of life in a second language and another culture, I stumbled out of the mission field into the waiting arms of the North American church. From missionary to pastor’s wife. Frying pan, meet fire.
I found it was one thing to ask questions and even to have doubts from behind a computer screen, but the same people who had seemed anxious to dismiss my questions from afar tried to scold me for my observations in person. They liked to say things like “Tearing things down is easy” and “Complaints should come with solutions.” And at first this shut me up. But the thing is, you don’t have to have solutions prepared before you point out legitimate problems. That’s bullshit and it doesn’t even make sense.
Think about it. If someone pointed out that you had a rash, you wouldn’t refuse to look at it if they couldn’t also tell you how to treat it. That would be the dumbest thing ever. If I told my husband I could hear that something was wrong with our car, he wouldn’t say, “Talk to me when you know how to fix it.” You don’t have to understand how to cure someone to
know and care that they are sick. When it comes to making the world a better place, we should all be looking for helpful ways forward, so don’t let anyone convince you that you shouldn’t engage in hard conversations. Your voice matters.
And listen. People who believe that “tearing things down is easy” have clearly never done it. At least not properly. So they don’t understand that tearing down the early versions of your own faith (even that annoying chick with the mom bob and the gold cross) is like taking a sledgehammer to your childhood home. It’s not easy to dismantle the very things that helped make you who you are. It’s not easy to stay grateful for your own journey while you acknowledge that certain parts of it were incredibly unhealthy and shouldn’t be perpetuated.
But while tearing down things you once loved to make room for something new is never easy (it’s super fucking hard), harder still is figuring out what “something new” is supposed to look like and then learning how to build it from the ground up. This is especially daunting when you’re still in the middle of clearing off your spiritual foundation and picking through the debris.
For me, the experience of dismantling my simple ideology felt bittersweet. It was necessary and liberating, and at times it felt damn good, but it was also sad, and confusing, and lonely. It’s scary to get back up after you’ve been crushed by the realization that the church you grew up in or the ministry you championed or the spiritual leaders you adored, supported, and trusted were perhaps not as awesome and amazing as you once believed. If they turn out to be abusers, liars, crooks, pathological narcissists, and/or asshats in general, it’s worse, and some people never recover from the pain, anger, and disappointment.
I read something somewhere (like, in the Bible maybe?), about a bunch of religious leaders who were screaming at Jesus about shit like upholding the law and honoring traditions and doing things the way they’d always been done. It was a Sabbath day, and when they challenged him about working on a holy day of rest, Jesus went right out and found a man who’d been living on the fringe for far too long, deemed by the religious to be unclean and unwelcome because of a shriveled arm. Jesus approached the man and said, “Stretch out your hand.” When he did, his arm was fully restored. And for doing the work of healing on the Sabbath, Jesus was accused of breaking the laws. The leadership went bonkers, and self-righteous freaking out ensued.
I point out that story because what we’re talking about isn’t new. The world has long been full of hurt and need, but religious leaders are often too tightly bound to their own agenda to offer any real help. It’s been like this for ages. But Jesus isn’t interested in preserving the way it’s always been. He came to heal the paralyzed, so you don’t have to stay stuck.
Jesus heals the sick, the blind, the lame, and the broken, and that includes battered souls and fractured hearts and brains that have forgotten how to think for themselves. Many of us have been hurt by the church, but to be redeemed by God is to understand that, though you have been wounded, you don’t have to keep bleeding. You are redeemed. Now you can see. Now you can stand. To trust God is to stretch out your hand.
To bring light and hope, you and I must show up for life in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, and in our schools not as “missionaries” and self-proclaimed blessings but as imperfect parents, genuine friends, competent professionals, and messy people. We must show up as safe havens, not as mini saviors. We must bravely show up in our everyday lives to do our best with what we have, listening carefully, serving sensibly, and loving fully as active participants in the story of who God is and what God does.
If you have a pulse—regardless of your age, race, nationality, gender, religion, or politics—you are probably already working in collaboration with the creator of the universe to write the story of the planet Earth. That’s why you’re so damn tired!
How we speak to a waiter, treat a beggar, spend a dollar—with every action we take, we are creating the world we live in. We get to decide whether our contribution to this story is patience or exasperation, compassion or condemnation, awareness or foolishness, liberation or enslavement. We can’t go back and erase the parts we’re not proud of, but we can move forward different and better.
We don’t need to spend another second of our life wondering about our spiritual calling, because we’re already right here in the thick of it. We’re already called. It doesn’t matter where you live, whom you know, what you can do, or how much you have to offer; you were called into the fray on the day you were born, and your calling is love.
Love God and love others. That’s the whole deal.
But to love others well, we have to see them as whole people in a big picture, not just as cute little vignettes to be used in our own narrative. We have to remember that no matter how rich, poor, foreign, different, or messed up they might seem, they are as called by God and as rich in love as we are. For me, that meant seeing that Costa Rican football players, Nicaraguan coffee pickers, wealthy expats, poor Precario moms, and even all those dumb-ass missionaries whose paths crisscrossed my own were also writers of the story—and that, like me, they were probably doing their best.
Sometimes our story lines will come together, and we’ll get to create something inspiring and uplifting, hopefully something that honors God and people. But conflict and tension are unavoidable. They’re just what happens when there are this many characters with different motivations and we all bring our own ideas about what should come next.
So, as much as it depends on you and me, let’s agree to write an epic of love to the benefit of others.
I can’t say exactly what this is all supposed to look like for you—our roles in God’s wild purpose for the world are as unique as each of us. But I imagine that our mission of mercy is similar, and it might look a little like this:
Show up as needed to love your neighbor with your eyes wide open and your arms outstretched. Start by doing your best…and then, tomorrow, do better.
* * *
On my fortieth birthday, I stretched out my arm and got a big fat tattoo. It goes from shoulder to elbow, in full color, super traditional Americana style, and it has, like, a swallow in flight over a heart above an anchor, and there’s some rope and flowers and stuff, and the swallow is holding a banner that says “Act Justly, Love Mercy, Walk Humbly.” Okay, okay, I’m sorry! I know! The only thing worse than listening to someone describe their tattoo is listening to them explain the dream they had the other night. I apologize if I sound like a huge douche right now, and I promise I’m not trying to be annoying. But I think the tattoo itself is relevant here, because right after I got it, I felt a little twinge of oh-my-god-what-have-I-done.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love this tattoo, I still think it’s beautiful, and I passionately stand behind the Bible verse that inspired it (Micah 6:8, if you care). But one of the things you learn within the first week after getting a tattoo that people can see when you’re fully dressed is that you’re going to get the same ten questions and comments from complete strangers (mostly dude bros in tank tops) every summer day for the rest of your life:
“Did that hurt?”
“Nice ink.”
“How long did that take?”
“I like your ink.”
“I don’t like tattoos.”
“I don’t like tattoos on girls.”
“I looove girls with tattoos.”
“Who did your ink?”
“Can I see the whole thing?”
“What does it say?”
“Do you have any other ink?”
A visible tattoo may as well be a neon sign that says, “Come talk to me!” which is reason enough for me as an introvert to wish I’d gone with a less visible placement. But the real problem is that to wear these words on my flesh is the equivalent of having one of those Christian fish thingies on my car, except worse, because if someone sees me do someth
ing shitty, I can’t just lie and say I wasn’t the one driving. My flesh and my soul are now accountable to each other—permanently, visually, and publicly. I can make excuses for my behavior a thousand ways to Sunday, but if at the end of the day I fail to act with justice, mercy, and humility, I have to own that. And everybody knows it.
But actually nothing has changed.
I was already accountable to God and others for the way I live. It’s just that this tattoo put me face to face with some of my own gross hypocrisy. If I look in the bathroom mirror and I’m wearing a T-shirt that was made by slave labor over the words “Act Justly,” I have to answer for that.
When I catch my reflection in a store window as I’m actively trying to avoid making eye contact with a mentally ill homeless guy who’s waving to catch the attention of the chick with “Love Mercy” written on her arm, I have to answer for that.
When I see myself through the eyes of my family, friends, and neighbors, looking more like a powder keg full of outrage, impatience, and irritability, angry enough to punch puppies, I have to answer to the words “Walk Humbly” printed clearly across my very own bicep.
And I have to answer not later, when I’m dead, but now. Right now. Today. Because every time I look in the mirror, the story I’m writing with my life is staring straight back at me.
About a month after I got this tattoo, a super old man came up to me in a hardware store and asked if he could see it. I pulled my sleeve up over my shoulder to give him a view of the whole thing, which he took a very long time to examine. I never know what to do or what to say when this happens. It’s like figuring out what to do with your hands when someone is taking your picture. In these tattoo-inspection situations, I just don’t know how long I’m supposed to stand still or which way to turn my head. It usually feels like I cut the person off too early or pull my sleeve down too late. It’s awkward. Anyway.