pat loughery

Today was a bit tricky. I had to have a difficult conversation with somebody about boundaries. We’ve had a friend stayng in our home for the past few weeks as she gets up on her feet again, and the end of that time is coming soon. I also had to express some reservation about a recent scenario that I handled poorly and would change if I could do it again.

Boundaries are important for a pastoral couple, but man oh man are they hard to define. If we are to be a church which did what Jesus did (and more importantly does what Jesus is NOW doing), and if that includes aggressively pursuing relationship with people who are broken and addicted and hurting (even more than we ourselves are), that means that we’re to place ourselves at risk.

But the question is – how much risk? How much risk is the “proper” amount?

We can’t live risk-free lives. But I also have a responsibility to my family, to provide a reasonably safe home – a shelter from the world, a nice place to escape for a while from what happens “out there”.

Several years ago, in our previous church and when we had just moved into an apartment in the area and Kaileigh hadn’t yet come, a young homeless couple came into the church and we invited them into our home. They were there for a month or so. It was a good experience for us. We learned a lot about ourselves, about compassion and about the church’s response to that kind of situation. Much of what we learned surprised us. We had more negative comments from people in our church for doing what we did than we’d ever received before (or perhaps since, though I don’t want to think too hard about whether that’s true).

In the intervening years we’ve learned a lot about boundaries – how to express what’s OK and what’s not OK. How to better handle conflict situations. how to express love but not be walked upon. That even if we do these things well, people may not get what they want or hope for from us, and hard feelings can happen.

And when hard feelings DO happen, then the tempation is to say, “Well, we’ll never do that again. We’re closing our doors”. It’s tempting to use Kaileigh as an excuse – we can’t allow that anything in our home that puts Kaileigh at risk. This is a seriously large portion of the decision process, of course, but at what point is it simply a convenient excuse for us to not pursue compassion and mercy?

But we can’t simply say “no”, can we? We can’t leave the hard work of people-loving to others in the church, while we tackle the easy, simple, safe challenges. We have to lead by example, by being who we are individually and communally called to be.

And so we continue to live out our faith, carefully risking and riskily caring. And cleaning up messes as they occur.