Photo by Eli Pluma on Unsplash

A little-known fact that I may not have shared in this space is that I worked as a birth doula for a handful of years. After graduating with a social work degree, I spent a year working part-time in a hospital where the midwives invited me to a Centering program intended to improve health outcomes while building community amongst low-income, expectant mothers. I was sold. Not yet a mother myself, I was touched by the powerful role that connection, support, and affirming the strength of a mother’s love, carried in the long-term health of both mother and baby. Thus began my journey as a birth doula.

At its core, serving in this role with a laboring woman means accompanying and advocating for her at a vulnerable time. She has a question about a procedure? A doula ensures that her voice is heard, and her questions answered. She wants ice chips; she gets ice chips. Dad passed out in the hallway; a doula stays present during the epidural. She needs to change position and hear that she is strong, we brainstorm comfortable ideas and affirm her body’s strength. Baby needs to go to the NICU? A doula stays with mom, seeking clear answers to calm her fears.

In this role, I have had the distinct privilege of cheering on and witnessing the heroic strength of many of my friends as they have brought their children into the world. And because I was earning credentials, I had the honor of walking with women who invited me to learn with them as I logged my volunteer hours. I distinctly remember a high school mother navigating the system alone; a young couple excited at the arrival of their first child. Through this experience, I met a refugee woman who was alone in a foreign medical setting and only wanted me to hold her hand as she labored.

It was beautiful, raw, humbling, and meaningful work to support women and families during such a transformative experience in their lives.

I learned early that not every birth is textbook. As resilient as we are, pregnancy can reveal some fears and vulnerabilities. Birth plans are as good as they are hubris. Nothing can make a person more aware that they are not the author of life, like bringing a child to birth.
Perhaps I will return to this kind of work when the cadence of my life allows me to be gone for indefinite amounts of time again. For now, I have shifted from the ministry of presence to the ministry of words, and each calls forth a certain labor.

I have been re-visiting this era of my life with greater frequency lately because I am reminded that accompanying someone, choosing my words, cultivating my character, actively choosing to listen, and bearing a commitment to a world where mercy and the beatitudes are the norm, is slow, messy, necessary work that greatly improves healthy outcomes.

In many ways, I am feeling the pull to fall back upon the skills I learned as a doula to walk with people during a tumultuous time, or maybe just to reassure myself of the goodness in the world. Then again, we don’t have to have any particular specialty to recognize where the imago dei is being called into question, scrutinized, and judged as worthy or not.

We are unsettled, and if we aren’t, we probably should be.

Your internet browser is likely working as well as mine so I will trust that you’ve seen your share of recent headlines. Troubling messages, truths, and untruths are being splashed across screens and bring with them chaos, fear, and confusion about how we got to where we are. And while that is uncomfortable, we are not ill-equipped to respond, but probably unpracticed.

For a long time, many of us have lived with the luxury of social programming, and social funding—maintaining a healthy distance while allowing the ‘experts’ to help people on the margins. While this structure has been useful and good, it has shifted the onus of supporting those living on the margins from us to ‘them.’ I’ll speak for myself to say it is far easier to set up online giving than it is to show up monthly to the food bank, overnight shelter, or low-income classroom for tutoring. Let’s leave it to the experts, shall we?

Our current system depends on us and them.

And yet, us and them is the antithesis of Christianity. We have allowed ourselves to be convinced, or perhaps convenienced, into believing that someone else can do it better than us, and to wash our hands of the matter. This smacks of the story of the Good Samaritan, where all but one passerby had an excuse to not be the one to meet the unmet need. And yet, who did Jesus acknowledge as neighbor, but the one who got their hands dirty and stopped.

In my heart of hearts, I am hopeful that with our current circumstances will come a surge of Gospel DIYers who resonate with the words of June Jordan’s poem for South African women, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

We do not have to be specialists to notice the needs of our actual neighbors. Shoveling a driveway, an exchange at the mailbox, a double-batch of soup, calling our representatives, dropping off underwear and school supplies to local Title I schools, all count.

As disheartening as the news cycle has been lately, I am taking courage in the belief that the work of the Gospel can and must be lived out in our own homes while extending beyond them. It is to our detriment to believe that executive actions, however unjust and short-sighted, diminish the importance of our own lived witness to the dignity of the human person. Any more than believing our civic responsibilities cover for our responsibilities as followers of Christ. Perhaps the most important work we can do today is to take time to assess the ways we do/could put some skin in the game rather than relying solely on our tax dollars to do it for us.