Movin' On Up

In life, there are three constants: Death, Taxes, and Moving. Unless you were born, raised, and buried on the generations-old family homestead, most of us eventually pack up our quasi-precious belongings and send out cutesy Christmas newsletters (or similar) announcing our relocation. But, regardless of your moving experience (or lack thereof), everyone in the world has helped another person move. Your probability of being asked to help move increases exponentially if you are 1) visibly stronger than others and 2) own a truck. If you want to avoid any and all requests for moving assistance, I suggest you either move to a remote cabin in the woods and/or never purchase a truck.

Most of us seminarians have helped our sisters/brothers in Christ move in/out throughout the semester. And just as June is the peak season for weddings, it has also been the peak season for moving. Graduated seniors, leaving the seminary nest in order to test their wings at a first call, are packing up three year’s worth of belongings and memories. Couples, uniting their lives and bank-accounts in marriage, are merging two apartments of “stuff” into tiny, seminary subsidized housing. Some people, like yours truly, are abandoning the freedom of apartment life for smaller [re: cheaper] quarters in the campus residence hall.

Helping another person move is usually pain in the ass. Those who are moving realize this and frequently hesitate to ask for assistance. But living in a community, seminary or otherwise, requires the humility to ask for help and the kindness to give it. Allow me to paraphrase a popular section from Ecclesiastes: “To everything, there is a season…a time to move, and a time to help move. A time to give grace, and a time to receive it. A time to love, and a time to allow yourself to be loved.” Sometimes we are the mover and other times, we are the one moving (Unless, of course, you are God—the unmoved mover—but that’s another post for another time).

Such is the “Circle of Life,” to borrow a phrase from The Lion King. In order to grow individually as people and collectively as a community, we must uphold symbiotic relationships; otherwise, those who continually give will burn out and those who never give or contribute eventually subject their lives to the will of others. However, human sin disrupts perfect symbiosis and therefore, true reciprocity does not exist in our world. Just like communism works in theory but not praxis, community life never achieves a healthy balance of givers and takers. A recent news headline declares that a huge sum of FEMA aid was not used for its intended purposes, but rather was squandered by people who were not hurricane victims. As much as 16% of FEMA aid went to frivolous causes by fraudulent people, rather than those who needed the money most of all. Unfortunately, such fraud will result in more bureaucratic red-tape, complicating the relief process further for disaster victims.

Though such atrocities exist, we must not let the reality of human sin prevent us from acting as good neighbors. The hopelessness of the FEMA fraud or other derivitives of community cynicism must not prevent us from acting in good faith for the benefit of others. In the Presbyterian Church, we often say we are "blessed to be a blessing;" in other words, we help move because others have helped us move and will help us move again. The cycle of giving and receiving flows as effortslessy as the shifting of the Seasons or the rotation of day into night. May we all, then, remember our own blessings and the gifts of others, and live, not into apathy, but the fullness of the joy and grace of our Creator.