(Please note: An addendum/clarification to this post is available here.)

About ten years ago, my mom was a youth group leader at her church. The church was located in a very affluent community, and the kids in the group were very privileged indeed. The youth leaders decided that the kids needed to learn about the “less fortunate” and asked them if they would like to cook and serve a meal at an inner-city soup kitchen.

The kids were less than delighted at the prospect.

Finally, after a fair amount of cajoling, nagging (and probably tears on my mother’s part), the group decided to play along. They were serving a meal at the soup kitchen when a fight broke out between two of the diners. Things escalated when one of the combatants ran into the kitchen to find a knife. (The youth group girls huddled in a corner, crying hysterically, while all this commotion was taking place.)

After the day’s disastrous events, my mom asked my understandably-traumatized sister (who was in the youth group, and is now a very socially-conscious and kind-hearted adult) if she had learned anything that day. My sister nodded and said:

“I learned that I don’t like poor people.”

This story came to mind when I read a recent post by Pastor Pat Spelling over at Shades of Gray. She posted on well-intended “short term missions”, including a provocative article from the Washington Post entitled “Churches Retool Mission Trips“. The points that both Pastor Spelling and the Post article are good ones:

1. Short-term mission trips are often poorly conceived and executed by those organizing the trips. Youth groups are sent to “help” a community with no real understanding of that community’s needs or culture: In some cases the “help” offered is simply redundant (such as multiple groups painting and repainting a church over the course of the summer), but in other cases it is actually harmful to the community (i.e. putting local laborers out of work).

2. These trips are not cost effective: Participants are usually required to “raise funds” from church members, family and to cover their expenses, which can easy run from $1000-$3000. Thus a ten person youth group (plus chaperones) could easily spend $12 ,000-$30,000 to build a house or a hospital that, in the economy of many third-world countries, might only cost $2000-$10,000 if local labor was employed.

3. Most disturbing of all, however, is the attitude among many that even if such trips aren’t particularly cost-effective (or even necessary to those being “served”) they are justified because, after all, middle -class teenagers need to “learn” about their privilege and about the “less fortunate”. (Apparently the “less fortunate” are to endure these assaults upon their communities and local economies so that privileged youths can get an education. In other words, the poor get to be used as object lessons so that the privileged can engage in a course of self-improvement.)

Um, I don’t think so.

When it comes to serious, systemic poverty (and not just in the third world), “short-term” anything is pointless. Poverty, true poverty, is extremely complex, and people don’t “get it” just by going out and building a house or serving a meal at a homeless shelter. At best, kids on these trips are going to come back with “an appreciation of what they have” (but no real understanding of why they have it or how they got it or why other folks don’t have it), at worst, with attitudes like my sister’s after her visit to the soup kitchen.

If young people truly want to address poverty and its ills, they need to understand that going on an expensive working vacation is not the answer. Ironically, they would do best to take advantage of their privilege and the benefits that it affords them: They could use their social networks to raise cash, not for mission trips, but to send directly to long-standing aid agencies in third world countries. They could go to university to become doctors and nurses and engineers and agriculturalists and then visit a third world country to teach, train, solve problems, and generally do the sorts of specialist work that is actually needed. They could also work to transform social and foreign policy in their own countries or house and befriend students from third-world countries who are trying to bring new knowledge and skills back home.

But none of the above strategies sound as good as “My Johnny just went on a mission trip to help those poor people in South America!”. I just wonder what the “less fortunate” being “missioned” have to say to their friends after each group leaves for home.

]]> http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2008/08/01/mission-mess-ups/feed/ 2 http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2008/07/18/refusing-to-profit-from-mediocrity/ http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2008/07/18/refusing-to-profit-from-mediocrity/#comments Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:47:17 +0000 admin http://www.lainiepetersen.com/?p=85

Is the customer always right?

Even when their request (which they may well be willing to pay for) offends the sensibilities and standards of a purveyor of goods/services?

Maybe I should rephrase the question: If there is no inconvenience or cost to a business person, are they obligated to alter their product to meet the desires of a patron? And if the business person refuses to do so, is the patron justified in being miffed?

Recently two stories about coffee have been in the news: The first concerns Intelligentsia Coffee (an independent coffee roaster here in Chicago) announcing that its three cafes would no longer sell “venti” (20 oz) drinks. Doug Zell, Intelligentsia’s chief executive, explained that serving coffee in 20 oz sizes damaged the integrity of the product. If you want Intelligentsia coffee in one of their corporate-owned cafes, you are either going to drink it their way or not at all. Some Chicagoans are annoyed and are accusing Intelligentsia of snobbery.

The other story involves Murky Coffee of Arlington, Virgina. When a Mr. Jeff Simmermon requested iced espresso, he was informed that it was against company policy to prepare espresso in such a manner. Words were exchanged and Mr. Simmermon took the establishment to task in his blog. Nick Cho, the owner of Murky, responded via comment on Mr. Simmermon’s blog. In his comment he both explained his policy on iced espresso and threatened harm to Mr. Simmermon’s genitalia.

This “Murky” matter is now national news with people debating  “the customer is always right” vs “professional integrity”.

I favor professional integrity, myself. This isn’t just about coffee, it’s about aesthetics, morals, and principle.

Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s will recall the old Burger King commercial which assured patrons that they could “have it their way”. Yet while BK was customizing its odious “food”, a quiet revolution was taking place on the west coast. There, Alice Waters had established Chez Pannisse, a restaurant that was decidedly not about customer whims, but about teaching people to eat well. Chef Waters prepared a meal each day (from fresh, in-season, local ingredients), and customers ate it. (If customers didn’t want to eat the meal, they could go to Burger King instead.)

Because Alice Waters stuck to her guns and refused to cater to the lowest common denominator, we now have access to all sorts of quality foodstuffs, both in restaurants and in shops. Waters knew that the customer wasn’t always right, because, quite frankly, the customer can’t always be right. The customer needs education before s/he can be “right” about the proprietor’s specialty. People like Waters, Cho, and Zell would rather lose a customer, even suffer some ill-will, rather than profit from ignorance.

I call that good business. God bless them, and others like them, for refusing to succumb to demands for mediocrity.

Have a great weekend!

I’ve been blogging on and off for close to a year now, and this blog has certainly seen its share of twists and turns. Originally created to share my writings on Christianity (especially the missional movement), I also wrote about Asperger’s Syndrome, as well as suggesting various resources for people in ministry. Unfortunately, I had to take the whole thing down back in January due to some very serious personal circumstances and an Internet stalker of whose I identity I am still not certain (though I now know that it wasn’t who I thought it was, very cloak and dagger, this).

I re-launched the blog a few months ago, though my still-insane personal life had made regular updating difficult. Then, about two months ago, I suffered a particularly devastating betrayal that not only left me reeling but also robbed me of the ability to engage in any sort of formal writing. This experience has also left me in a different place spiritually than I was when I started the blog.

In any case, it is time for me to start blogging regularly again. I am, however, going to be making some changes in this blog and its content. For one thing, most of my blog posts have tended to be in “article” format. The trouble is that writing articles takes a bit of time and delays regular updating. The other problem is that I enjoy writing on a variety of different topics, and it seems that the most successful blogs are more specialized. So this is what I am going to do:

*lainiepetersen.com will remain as my personal blog. I will post both updates from my day-to-day life (which I generally haven’t done in the past), as well as longer screeds on spirituality, theology, psychology, personal insights, etc.

*I have already purchased several domains which I will be using for more specialized blogs on adoption, Asperger’s Syndrome, resources for clergy, etc. Expect to see them introduced here over the next few weeks.

*One day a week I will do a “roundup” post on lainiepetersen.com which will have links to the posts on my specialized blog sites. Readers on this blog will be able to pick and choose which, if any, interest them.

*I am continuing to give unsolicited advice on Hubpages. Please do pay me a visit there.

I hope this all makes sense. I know it sounds ambitious, but I like a challenge now and then.
Peace out.

When I was a teenager, ads for anti-acne and “skin cleaning” products insisted that we could tell that the product was working because it made our skin “tingle” (i.e. burn). This clever marketing led my generation to erroneously connect pain with the medicinal efficacy of a skincare product.

I say “erroneously” because these nasty, burning products did nothing to keep the zits at bay: Instead, they burned because they were, in fact, really irritating our poor skins. The irritation had nothing to do with curing acne or keeping our pores clean, it just made our skin problems worse. Fortunately for younger generations, consumer advocates like Paula Begoun came along to set women straight: Girls now know that if a cosmetic product “burns” it is irritating and harming your skin, not healing it.

So eventually I got over the notion that in order to make my skin look better I had to apply stinging astringents. But I didn’t necessarily get over the notion that pain=healing. I kept with me the idea that the “right” choice for a Christian was almost always the most painful one.

Now I am perfectly aware that pain is unavoidable and that, indeed, oftentimes the right choice in a given situation is one that results in suffering. At the same time, however, I want to challenge the idea that we, as Christians, should assume that the most painful choice is always the correct one.

Discernment is always a difficult task, and it is made more difficult by the fact that it is often colored by our own desires and needs . But we can just as easily fool ourselves into making the choice that will cause us the most pain, just because we think that it is necessarily the “holiest” option. But just as we can deceive ourselves into thinking that God wants us to make the easiest, most pleasant choice for ourselves, we can also deceive ourselves into thinking that God always wants us to suffer.

The ugly truth is that humans are prone to self-deception. We are also prone to constructing self-images that, while inaccurate, we are deeply invested in maintaining. In choosing pain over something more pleasant, we may not be practicing selflessness, but instead might (emphasis on “might”) be engaging in a selfish boosting of our own ego. After all, if we can cast ourselves as sacrificial and selfless with our choices, the better Christian we (and others) will think that we are. In the end, though, we have made a choice that is primarily focused on us, with little concern for God’s desires or the needs of those around us.

There is no easy answer to difficult choices, of course (in fact, this is what makes them “difficult”). Thus, the easy/hard, pleasant/painful dichotomies need to be recognized as simplistic and false. Recognizing our humanity, with our creaturely needs and limitations, and honoring this aspect of who we are, isn’t selfish and it isn’t bad. In fact, it is the first step towards understanding ourselves in relation to our God and others. It is also the first step in learning that our suffering (or our joy) is not the most important consideration in our choices, nor, for that matter, in God’s decision to love us anyway.

Still trying to get my bearings, but here is a reprint of something that I recently posted on another forum. I had explored some of these ideas a few months ago in a discussion on John Smulo’s blog, and I’ll probably continue to explore them quite on my own.

**********************

Understanding love (of any sort, but particularly romantic love) first requires an understanding of intimacy: A relationship characterized by a deep and mutual knowledge of the other. True intimacy is something that must be built up over time, during which the parties to a relationship need to interact fairly consistently, particularly throughout the significant changes and milestones that life brings. There is no shortcut to intimacy: “Chemistry”, “rapport”, or even the nebulous concept of the “soul-mate”, are no substitutes for a shared history in vulnerability, conflict and its resolution, empathy, support, and trust. Intimacy is by its very nature mutual, symbiotic, reciprocal, and shared. There is no such thing as “unrequited” intimacy nor is intimacy particularly accidental or uncontrollable. For intimacy to exist, both parties must desire not only to fully know the other, but to make themselves known as well. A desire to only know the other, without making oneself known is best defined as obsession, whilst a desire to only make oneself known should be considered narcissism. Intimacy is at odds with both of these states.

Love, on the other hand, is best defined as the desire for intimacy with the other, which means that love is not dependent on reciprocity, trust, or even good sense. Our desires are not entirely voluntary, and as such, we can love (or worse yet, “fall in love with”) those who are unable or unwilling to know us and be known in return. Furthermore, desires can be fickle and are greatly affected by circumstances that can hinder, or encourage, their development. When love ends it is characterized by a lack of desire for intimacy. One no longer seeks to truly know the other, nor does one seek to make oneself known. Eventually intimacy disappears, along with the love, thus bringing  stagnation to a relationship, if not the end of it (the latter being typically the case in romantic relationships).

All this is not to undermine the importance of love. Love is clearly one of the most powerful forces that we know. Love as a desire, can itself be unstable, but its overwhelming power forges some of the most stable of relationships. The love that a parent has for his/her child is that which keeps the exhausted mother/father from tossing a squalling newborn out the window. Likewise, it encourages new couples to overlook minor (and sometimes) major differences early on in their relationship, so that a more symbiotic intimacy can be formed and the relationship solidified. Love encourages friends, who have no legal or familial obligation to each other, to form strong bonds and support networks. It needs to be understood, however, that love is that force, that power, which enables the development of a truly intimate relationship. Love does not define a relationship, nor is it the relationship itself. When we remember that it is a desire, nothing more, nothing less, we are better able to understand, channel, master and use it, rather than being dominated by it to no good end.