Humans of New York is a deservedly popular photoblog featuring people on the street, along with excerpts from conversations about their lives. The other day, it featured a young woman who looks frankly at the camera and packs a tremendous amount of life into her statement.
She begins, “I was feeling frustrated.” She had been volunteering at a food pantry and hated how they were “meeting people’s physical needs, but not their relational needs.” Because she is pro-life, she prayed about what to do, and she and a friend started a group for new moms at her church.
“That first night nobody showed up, but by then I was convinced that God wanted me to do this,” she said.
So she kept promoting it, and before long a pregnant mother with two toddlers needed help desperately, so her group stepped up and helped her through the birth and beyond.
“She later told me that she’d never experienced that sort of unconditional love. And that’s exactly what we wanted. To create a place where people could feel known and loved,” she said.
The group grew in strength and size, meeting weekly and continuing to have intense conversations in the parking lot after the group closed for the night.
She says: “We’d been meeting for about eighteen months when I had my miscarriage…. I remember how much I was looking forward to the next meeting, because I knew that people were going to, like—love me…. I remember thinking: ‘Wow. I’m not sure what I would do without this group.’”
This extraordinary witness garnered the standard things people say when someone calls themselves “pro-life.” Pro-lifers loved her and said that they knew lots of people like her. Some pro-choicers admired her work and praised her consistency. A few pro-choicers snarkily tapped out because the phrase “pro-life” gave them an insurmountable ick.
But there were also several iterations of a different comment that worried me: They liked her work but criticized her for giving credit to God. Here’s a typical example:
She’s amazing. But something that gives me pause about this post is that this woman cares deeply for her community and was inspired to help them through her humanity, but chalks it up to God wanting her to do it. Like, no. Celebrate your ability to feel empathy and act on it. It has nothing to do with God. It’s so ingrained in religious communities to think so poorly of yourself that you can’t recognize your own successes as your own.
I reread the passage a few times, thinking I had missed some uncomfortably fanatical passage where the woman in the photo says she is a mere worm or nothing but a useless vessel through which God works. But all she said was that she was convinced God wanted her to do it.
She barely even mentioned anything spiritual or divine. Her whole statement was about understanding that it is her duty to build human relationships because that’s what people need. She was elbow-deep in the nitty-gritty human end of her faith from day one, and by the end of her remarkable short witness, she showed how her work, meant to benefit other people, ended up serving and saving her, as well. She doesn’t “think poorly of herself” at all, that I can see. She does, however, recognize that there is more going on in her life than, well, her.
Why do we have trouble believing people who say they do something because God called them to do it? When a star athlete says he owes his victory to his grandma, who always believed in him, nobody complains. When a groundbreaking researcher credits an elementary school librarian who said he could do great things one day, that is universally considered nice and good and heartwarming. But when a Christian says, “I did this because God wanted me to,” then suddenly it is psychologically unhealthy or a sign of poor self-esteem. Why?
The obvious reason is that people don’t believe in God. So hearing “God wanted me to do it” comes across as, “I did it because The Octopus King, mighty are his suckered arms, hath willed it.” It sounds nuts.
But I think it also points to something possibly even sadder than not believing in God: They don’t realize that what we are supposed to have with God is a relationship. A real, literal relationship, something with give and take and affection and humor, sacrifice and insight and gratitude, something that any normal human being would recognize as a relationship. This is what we are supposed to have with God.
And yes, sometimes he asks us to do things. Very often, the things he asks us to do end up being the things we ourselves need.
Why do so many non-Christians fail to see this? Partly because of the hypocritical example of famous Christians. There’s no doubt about that: If you’re on TV and you make a point of saying you’re Christian, there is a chance you are about to do something vicious and cruel. That doesn’t help.
But the other reason is that Christians also don’t see it. Believers of good will, who are genuinely trying to live a decent, moral life, often do not understand that a true relationship with God is what we are seeking. They simply don’t realize it, and they think that long-ingrained habits of resentment, rebellion, bitterness, guilt and fear—or simply sterile distance—are what a relationship with God always looks like.
If this is where we’re at, what can be done?
The place where the woman in Humans of New York starts her story would not be a bad place for anyone to start. She is frustrated; she decides to do something about it. The thing she does is think about what other people need, and then she goes for it.
I would bet the young woman’s relationship with God and her relationship with other people are not really different things.
That is how we build a relationship with God: by building relationships with other people. And that is how we secure help for ourselves: by serving God. It’s all the same thing, and should all feel recognizably like the same thing.
It is not automatic from there. You don’t just do a good deed, and then, boom, you’re best friends with the Lord. But it is not possible to have a meaningful relationship with God without at least trying to serve other people. A young woman who serves others because God wants her to is not thinking poorly of herself. She simply knows God is the source of goodness, of help, of comfort and of love, and if you want to help someone who is thirsty, you have to draw from a well which is from God. Which is God.
Serving other people is how you serve God. And serving other people, pouring yourself out for them, is how you circle around one day, tired and thirsty, and find the reservoir overflowing, waiting for you. It’s all the same thing.
