My senior year of high school I had the opportunity to work at a Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) site in Detroit, Mich. Two years prior, Detroit had experienced flooding that left parts of an already-broken city broken and under feet of water. Two years after the flooding, MDS and other organizations were working to clear out and repair basements that had been destroyed and every week they were getting more calls from homeowners who had not yet had any work done. Having grown up in Northeast Ohio, I am used to seeing the ravaged remains of the steel industry that provided for thousands of families in the Great Lakes Region. But no matter how prepared to go to Detroit I thought I was, I was not prepared at all.
Not long after passing signs for the Detroit exits from Interstate 75, the abandoned buildings are visible with broken windows, boarded doors, and graffiti reminding us that this city may be broken, but it is still breathing. The MDS project was headquartered near downtown in a local church not far from Eight Mile, a road acting as both a physical and psychological divide in the city. On one side is the promise of prosperity through economic growth for the primarily white middle class who live there. The other is a predominantly AfricanAmerican neighborhood struggling with drugs, prostitution, gang violence, and poverty. A community that has been left in the shadows of injustice.
While the blight of the city was visible, radiating stronger was the spirit of the homeowner we worked with, a single mother who had been waiting for two years to have work done on her basement. Standing on the sidewalk among the cracked cement, broken bottles, dirty needles, and bullet casings, the homeowner greeted us not with anger and frustration from the wait, but with joy, a joy she attributed to the fact that it was only her basement that was ruined in the flood, not her kids. That while jobs may have left Detroit, Jesus did not. I have never seen such hope in a situation that, from the outside, seems utterly hopeless.
There will be times when we want to be fueled solely by emotion and disregard any sense of hope. We must not let our emotions blind us, causing a fall into despair. The homeowner in Detroit had every reason to see life as cold and unfair, but she did not. In the midst of suffering and pain she had hope. She had hope in her children and hope in organizations like MDS who were not there to save the people of Detroit, but invest in them. We must also have hope in whatever situation we may be in.
Anne Frank, a young woman who knew far more pain than anyone should, wrote about hope and misery: “At such moments I don’t think about all the misery, but about the beauty that still remains.” There is pain and suffering in this world from which we cannot escape. But among the suffering and death, there is beauty that can be found, all we must do is look for it. There is suffering in the abandoned, worn-down streets of Detroit, but there is beauty in a woman and her children smiling on their front porch with their neighbors. There is pain in mass shootings, but there is beauty in communities that come together in love and support. I share this story not as a narrative of my experience, but as a reminder to radiate in the darkness as we stand on broken sidewalks among the remnants of violence and pain. In a world so full of suffering, what else is there to do?
