Temporary Identity

It’s been 5 months since I last blogged here. I feel bad about not having blogged about alot of stuff I’ve thought over that time, but one of the things I’m learning is that most things are temporary, especially when you have a baby!

It was around 5 months ago that I had a bit of an identity crisis. The root of this clearly stem from losing my daughter Amy over 2 years ago, and coincided with my son Toby being born. His birth threw up a few things for me including who I am. I’m now Toby’s Dad, and I’m Amy’s grieving Dad. The joy and delight I have in Toby has left little emotional time to dwell on my grief and the tension between a grieving and joyful Dad has left me a bit confused.

It was around this time that I realised that I didn’t feel I belonged to the group of Christians I’ve known for the last 8 years. This was because after losing Amy, the dawning realisation that I had new and unique needs met a dawning realisation that these needs were not being met by this community of Christians I was part of. This group is fairly homogeneous since we all met at University and are of similar ages. Since we are all still young, and nobody had lost a child, we didn’t have any experience to know how to care for Mary-Lou and myself so we were were not able to be carried by the group. This wasn’t helped by not knowing myself how I could be helped. The pain and confusion of not having been carried by our Christian community left me feeling I didn’t belong. 

So I began getting busy, not knowing at the time that I was searching for an identity, something I could point to and say “This is what Ben is about, this is what he does”. I started Guerrilla Gardening in Moss Side. I started helping a project collecting fruit from Manchester gardens to distribute to the poor and hungry. I got funding for a High Definition Camcorder to record Asylum Seekers telling their stories. I started a podcast exploring the implications of Shane Claiborne’s book “The Irresistible Revolution”. I became co-ordinator of my street’s Home Watch. I started planning the Parliament Protest. I got pretty busy all of a sudden and had less and less time for Mary-Lou and Toby.

In the end I gave some of that up, cut back on others, and finished the rest. I’m not as busy as I was (outside of work) and I’m looking forward to discovering routines and patterns (temporary of course) of time and activity with Mary-Lou and Toby.

I’ve not discovered my identity, I’m sure I’ll be figuring it out the rest of my life. But for now it feels good and proper that I rest and invest in the place I have as Mary-Lou’s husband and Amy and Toby’s Dad.

Your Days Of Plenty Are Numbered

I very much enjoyed watching The Edukators this morning. It is a germna film about some young anti-capitalists who break into rich people’s homes and mess with the ornaments and furniture by rearranging them and pilling them on top of each other. They don’t steal anything, instead they just leave a note saying “Your Days Of Plenty Are Numbered”.

Mary-Lou and I have been thinking alot about our finances recently and about what our morals are regarding the poor. A friend who works with destitute asylum seekers recommended Shane Claiborne’s book “The Irrisistible Revolution” as the most challenging book he has ever read. Then he pointed me to this video:

Up until a year or so ago I used to obsess about the problems, injustices and dangers of the global economic system we live under.  It often left me with a sense of hopelessness since I couldn’t see what I could do to change anything. Slowly (which is typical) it dawned on me that engaging locally would mean that I stood a chance to make some difference to some people rather than hopelessly doing nothing.

I’m still trying to figure out how to engage with the injustices I come across locally. We learnt recently that we live on the 7th poorest ward in the country – Moss Side, Manchester. Yet we comfortably live in our own house and have a disposable income each month. What should be our response to that fact?