I remember in Eighth Grade learning about Greek mythology and the character Sisyphus. According to legend, Sisyphus was punished by Zeus by rolling an immense boulder up a hill, just to have the bolder roll back down the hill. I am sure a good number of people still believe that Sisyphus is still rolling that boulder today.
And I’ll be the first to admit, sometimes I feel like Sisyphus.
The work in the human service side of a non-profit organization can be mentally and emotionally exhausting. There are signs of brokenness everywhere. Broken lives, broken families, broken relationships.
Sometimes these are the cause of unhealthy addictions, bad behaviors passed down through generations and even bad luck. Whatever the reason that causes an individual or a family to come to our front door and ask for help, it’s a sad story and we constantly pray our world doesn’t have to continue to be this way.
Yet, our world is this way. And it’s even more heartbreaking to know that for every one person we get to help, there are others that aren’t making it to our front door or through our phone lines to get the help they need.
Sometimes, we are lucky. We get to see people that we help and we see these people take some sense of responsibility and start to rebuild their lives. I vividly remember meeting a girl in high school that remembered coming to our food pantry when she was elementary school. “You are the only people who loved us at our lowest point,” she told me. It was good to know that our organization is a stabilizing for force to help people get back to sense of normal and help them find meaning in their life.
But, sometimes, we aren’t so lucky. We see people that seem to have settled for their lot in life and It’s really sad in many ways. There are groups (like ours!) that want so much more for the people we are serving than they want for themselves. For some of these individuals, the desire to move forward is more scary than the relative calm they live in today. And as much as I want, I can’t want a better life for another person or another family and have it magically happen; these individuals and families have to want it as well.
And that is where it starts to feel like Sisyphus.
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with seeing the same faces over and over. Many of the people that we help are kind, generous and deserving of help. But, many of these folks are paralyzed in feeling that they are stuck where they area. And maybe they are, but maybe they aren’t.
The number one product our organization provides to our neighbors is hope. But hope only works when it’s activated by faith. And as much as I have tried, I can’t give faith to anyone. The person who has that hope must activate their own sense of faith; their own sense of adventure and desire to find a better and more stable life for themselves and their families. And, it’s challenging because hope seems to be in such short supply today.
Sisyphus was condemned by Zeus to push that boulder up the hill; but we aren’t being condemned to roll our own stones, at least not permanently. We all have challenges we have to rise up and meet. And sometimes, we are going to fall in meeting those challenges. But, we are better for trying and when we fall because we are also learning what it takes to succeed.
We have the one thing Sisyphus never had; we have hope. It’s a hope our friends and neighbors need to make a better life. It’s a hope we, as nonprofit professionals, need to help make a more resilient community.
I have had my say, what is yours?
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Stay Well,
Bill
Deeper Dive - Giving Hope - June 7, 2022
I am reminded of an outburst by John Cleese, playing an unfortunate Headmaster, in the film Clockwise. "It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair....
It's the hope"