Vulnerable Outsider

 

by Karen Melang

I’ve been an outsider before, and I’m sure you have, too. I’ve gone to a new place and wondered how I was supposed to act and if anyone would talk to me. I’ve visited a new church and hoped that I wouldn’t get lost on the way back from communion and that I could figure out when to kneel and when to stand up.

I’ve moved into a new community and wondered if I’d ever feel at home. I’ve looked intently into the eyes of everyone I met in the first few weeks and thought: “Are you going to be my friend? And if you are, can we get started right away, because I need you now.”

Friends tell me that being single in a crowd of couples makes them feel isolated and out of place. People with disabilities, too, say they often feel cut off from those around them by a wheelchair or a cane or something much less visible. Missing just one key ingredient that everyone else has is enough to make us feel like outsiders.

I remember going to a camp years ago in northern Minnesota. I was a young stay-at-home pastor’s wife with two small children. I loved those two kids deeply and madly—and still do—but at the same time, they were driving me nuts, the way small children will.

Then came the opportunity to attend a retreat for pastors’ spouses paid for by the wonderful women’s organization of our congregation. I signed up immediately. Three glorious days, I thought, away from diapers and spit-up. Three nights of solid sleep. I could not wait.

The sweaters
I arrived at the lodge and knew instantly I was in a community—a community to which I did not belong. Nearly everyone but me had on a Norwegian sweater, those lovely, heavy sweaters with the ornate silver buttons and patterns of reindeer or snowflakes or some other reminder of the cold. I was introduced to several very pleasant women whose given names I had never heard before and could not spell—Berit, Dagny, and (my favorite) Solveig.

Before we ate lunch, someone announced that we would sing a table prayer to the tune of “The Bells of Christmas Chime Once More.” I told the woman next to me, “I don’t know that tune.” She was incredulous. “How can you be a Lutheran,” she asked, mostly kidding, “and not know ‘The Bells of Christmas Chime Once More?’” How could I, indeed.

Before long these dear women welcomed me into their community. They even hugged me and told me where I could get a Norwegian sweater. I went from being an outsider to being pretty close to an insider, sans the sweater. To me, their sweaters signaled their sameness and my difference. “You do not belong,” the sweaters shouted at me, but I don’t think it was the message the sweater-wearers meant to send. It was late fall after all, the time for sweaters. I’m certain now that they were simply staying warm and celebrating their heritage at the same time. I bet none of them thought for a minute that something as innocuous as sweaters could make someone like me wonder: “Am I welcome here?”

The group
We all feel more at ease in groups where people are a lot like us. People with the same history, interests, and life experiences gravitate toward each other. We are attracted to those who have about the same amount of money and dress pretty much the way we do. Sameness makes us comfortable.

Difference makes us feel vulnerable even at church retreats. The dictionary says that vulnerable means able to be wounded; open to attack or damage. I certainly wasn’t in danger of being attacked at the pastors’ spouses’ retreat, but I could have been wounded by hurtful words or obvious exclusion. Of course, exactly the opposite happened. I found a community that welcomed outsiders and put me at ease.

Not every outsider is so lucky. Lots of times communities value sameness so highly that they constantly take the measure of those around them. They want to calculate who is enough like them to belong—and who can be excluded.

Eventually these kinds of communities always come to the edge of sameness. The moment comes when they see too many differences, and they will quickly build walls and dig moats. “You are in,” they will say, satisfied that someone is sufficiently like them to belong. “You,” they will say to another, noting too many deviations, “are out.”

The grocery
Most cues I get from others tell me that I am “in.” But at work I encounter some people who are mostly “out.” Recently I decided to at least occasionally cross the border into their world. Personal growth, I thought.

My big foray into new territory was to visit the Latino grocery market in our small downtown. I went without the long list I take to my usual grocer. I was just going there to browse, so there was no pressure to pick up anything in particular.

I was surprised by how much energy it took to get ready for this visit. There were so many things to worry about. I fretted over if I would be able to understand any of the signs. I thought about if anyone would be able to speak English to me. I wondered how many people like me go to that store and if any anyone would think that it was weird that I was there.

None of my worries were worth having. Several employees greeted me. They looked genuinely glad to see me. I could figure out enough of the signs to manage. The store looked different than my usual market in some ways. There were not many brands I recognized. There was a meat and fish counter with items I had never seen before.

The bakery section was beautiful. Pointing, I chose a few items, even though I didn’t know what they were. I asked, and someone came to tell me about them in English, but I didn’t really understand. Whatever they were, they were wonderful.

Happy with my purchase and relieved that I had managed my exotic journey, I left the store. For perhaps 15 full minutes, I had felt like an outsider in a Latino market in a smallish city in Nebraska.

The vulnerable outsider
The Scripture has a lot to say about outsiders. Ruth, whom we have been studying, was an outsider from Moab. In a town like Bethlehem, probably everyone knew before breakfast that Naomi’s foreign daughter-in-law had come home with her.

When they saw her, could the neighbors tell that Ruth was from somewhere else? Did she look different or dress oddly? Did she speak with an accent? Was her skin not quite the right shade? Were her clothes a little too ragged?

We know that Ruth’s status as an outsider made her vulnerable. Boaz knew it, too. He ordered his field hands not to molest this foreigner (Ruth 2:9). Naomi warned Ruth about the ugly things that might happen if she ended up in a not-so-friendly field (2:22).

If Ruth ever considered her vulnerability or felt afraid, we do not see it. She was optimistic, humble, and brave. She had only one goal: to care for Naomi, her bereaved and bitter mother-in-law.

Ruth’s story, of course, takes a wonderfully different turn. Naomi’s lovely long-range plans materialized almost beyond imagining. When the baby Obed was born, the delighted neighbor women declared that foreign-born Ruth was worth more to old Naomi than seven sons.

The lesson
Not all stories of vulnerable outsiders turn out as happily as Ruth’s did. Read any city’s newspaper or watch television or the Internet to see endings much different than Ruth’s. In a smaller and smaller world, all of us come closer to more and more strangers, no matter where we live. How will we react to those who are not quite like us? What signals will we send to outsiders? Maybe we should take a lesson from Boaz, whose first encounter with Ruth we read about in the second chapter of the book of Ruth. As was the custom of the poor, Ruth went out to the fields to pick up what was left behind after the harvest so she and Naomi would have something to eat. Boaz noticed her immediately, and he took action to make life easier for this outsider who was helping his relative Naomi.

  • Boaz welcomed Ruth with good advice and a safe place. He invited her to stay close to the women who worked for him. He assured her that he had told his men not to hurt her, and he told her where to get water during the heat of the day. He made her feel welcome by giving her information she needed about her new situation.

  • Boaz judged Ruth on her own merits and not on what he’d heard about Moabites. Surprised by his hospitality, Ruth asked Boaz why he was so kind to her, a foreigner. It was, he said, because of everything that Ruth had done for Naomi—how she had cared for Naomi since her husband’s death, how she had left home and family to come to a strange place, all for Naomi’s sake. Boaz didn’t let the fact that Ruth was an outsider blind him to her exceptional love and loyalty.
  • Boaz offered Ruth the most basic hospitality—food. At dinner time, Boaz invited Ruth to join the group, and he made sure the food was passed in her direction.

  • Boaz worked behind the scenes to make sure Ruth was successful. Perhaps Ruth didn’t know that on orders from Boaz more grain than usual was being left behind. Maybe it took her a while to realize how much Boaz was doing on her behalf. Perhaps it was this covert kindness that got Naomi thinking about what a good husband Boaz would be for the widowed Ruth.

Surely Ruth felt vulnerable that first morning when she went to work in the field that belonged to Boaz. When she came home that evening, safe and sound, with arms full of grain, she must have been elated. She was still an outsider—maybe in some sense would always be one—but in Boaz’s field she had been welcomed.

The cross
Am I welcome here or am I an outsider? Do I belong? All of us have these questions, and many of us get to answer “yes” much of the time. But no matter where we live or work, there are outsiders. Almost every classroom has them and almost every workplace. Skin color, race, economic status, and culture are only the beginning of the long list of things that mark the boundaries between insiders and outsiders, between us and them.

Us and them are not categories God recognizes. No one can read the gospels without noting Jesus’ warm welcome to a wildly diverse cast of characters. Both Jesus’ friends and his adversaries were shocked and alarmed by the odd company he kept.

“When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself,” Jesus told his disciples, determined, it seems, to make his circle of friends even wider ( John 12:32). On the cross, Jesus himself is the wounded outsider, abandoned even by God. But even then, dying, his arms are stretched out in welcome and love.

Jesus calls us, too, to live as if there were no outsiders, no us and them. We can offer safety to the vulnerable and acceptance to the outsider. Living the resurrected life along with Jesus, we see plainly that all the old categories are useless now and only get in the way. Now we can stretch our arms in welcome.

Now we can look into all the faces of those who come into our lives and see not outsiders, but God’s own image and likeness, strong and clear, looking back at us.

Karen Melang is the executive director of Fremont Area Habitat for Humanity, Fremont, Neb. She is a member of the Lutheran Deaconess Conference, class of 1971.

We're glad you enjoyed this online preview of Lutheran Woman Today.  But there is so much more inside each issue.  For just 3 cents a day, you can receive a year's worth of LWT's award–winning graphics and articles in your own home. Don't miss another issue — Subscribe now!