The Plate is Never the Point

There are a lot of words for the people we served over the years, and I have grown to dislike almost all of them.

Client. Guest. Recipient. Beneficiary. The unhoused. The food insecure. The elderly. The at-risk.

Every single one of those words describes a human being by what they are missing. It is a hole where a name should be.  And before I get too high up on this horse, let me be clear... I have used all of them. In grant applications. In reports. In conversations with funders. Some of them recently. There are moments when that is the language available and you use it because a meal depends on it. But I have never once typed or said one of those words and felt good about it.  The truth of it is that we can meet somebody's need completely and still leave them entirely alone.  (Oooof... say that a few times to yourself and see how you feel).

The ceiling on service

I have handed out a LOT of plates over the years. A few years back, after serving somewhere for a few years, I had a thought that genuinely embarrassed me. I could tell you what a certain person liked to eat, whether they wanted the vegetables, and roughly what time they would show up. I had accumulated over two years of information about this person.  Except...

I could not have told you their middle name... or last name.

Or whether they had siblings... or friends... or family.

Or what they did for a living before everything went sideways.

Or what they were afraid of at three in the morning.

I had served them faithfully and known them barely at all. And I know exactly how that lands, because I have been on the other end of it.

Years ago I spent thirteen years inside a formal process where a group of people were responsible for evaluating me.Thirteen years. By the end of it, they could have described my methodology in detail. My leadership style. My strengths, my weaknesses, my growth areas, all of it documented and filed. But they couldn't tell me...

The names of my family.

WHY I did any of this process.

What was underneath it.

What it cost.

They knew a great deal ABOUT me and almost nothing OF me. I was a file that moved along, and I eventually understood that the point of the process was not really me at all. I was there to serve a purpose.

And look, I doubt I am special here. I would bet most of you have been the file at some point. At a job, at a school, in a doctor's office, in a church, in a family. Thoroughly assessed. Never once actually asked about. That gap matters more than I wanted it to, because loneliness turns out to be a genuine health crisis, not a soft feeling. Researchers keep comparing chronic isolation to smoking in terms of what it does to a body. Which means if we hand somebody a hot meal and they eat it alone, we have addressed one hunger and walked right past another one. Service has a giver and a receiver. Clean roles. Everybody knows where they stand. Connection scrambles all of that, and that is exactly why it heals.

How you know you have crossed the line

Here is the test I use on myself now, and it is uncomfortably simple.

Do I know one thing about this person that has NOTHING to do with their need?

That is it. Not their diagnosis, not their housing status, not their case history. Something useless. Something you would learn about a friend. They played trumpet in high school. They think the Saints are cursed and can explain exactly why, at length. (Like most of us can... ugh). They have a granddaughter in Houston who calls on Sundays. They cannot stand cilantro. Useless information is the whole ballgame. It is the difference between a file and a friendship.

Which is basically why everything we do looks a little weird

Once you see this, it changes the design of things. And honestly, most of what we do at Just Love makes more sense once you know we are chasing this instead of chasing throughput.

At the Good Samaritan Initiative, we serve a meal on Tuesdays. But we put question cards on the tables, we sit down, and we talk about that silly, useless question.  I have watched, over and over, people staying long after their plate is empty, because being asked a real question is rarer for most of us than being handed food.

The Seasoned Curious Krewe started because older adults kept getting served and rarely getting ASKED. There is aparticular kind of loneliness that comes with being treated as somebody to be checked on. Wisdom that nobody wants is a heavy thing to carry around. So we built a room where the wisdom is the point.

Curiosity in the Wild, our Little Free Libraries, might be the purest version. There is no form. No ID. Nobody qualifies. You just open the box and take a book. Which quietly says: we assume you are curious. Not we assume you are needy... or need a book. That distinction sounds small, and it is not small at all.

And then Curious Krewe, where nobody is being served whatsoever. Just neighbors sitting around trading questions. Nobody is in charge. Nobody is the guru. Nobody is the poor soul who has to be helped because they cannot manage on their own. We are all equal. We are ALL the guru. And every last one of us walks in there needing something. Which is precisely why it works.

The moment the roles collapse

The best thing that has ever happened to me in this work was not a moment when I helped somebody.  It was a Tuesday when somebody in line asked how MY week was going. And then waited for the answer. And then followed up the next week about the thing I had mentioned. I do not have language sacred enough for what that does to a person. All my careful role clarity fell right over. I was not the helper anymore. I was just a guy who had a rough week, being cared for by somebody I had privately filed under people I help. That is where the healing actually lives, I think. Not in the transfer of goods. In the moment, two people are just two people.

One important catch, though

I have to say this part, because last post was all about not steamrolling people with our good intentions, and this idea can absolutely be weaponized.

Being known is not something you get to DO to somebody.

Some people want a plate and zero conversation, and that is completely allowed. Some folks are carrying things that make being known feel dangerous rather than warm. Some days a person has enough capacity for food and none for talking, and that is not a failure of our programming. So the invitation stays exactly that. An invitation. You sit down, you ask, you leave the door open, and then you let them decide. Every single time. Their no is still information, not rejection. (See last post. I am nothing if not consistent.)

Older than any of us, again

The spiritual and wisdom traditions all seem to know this one. There is an idea in southern Africa called Ubuntu, usually translated something like I am because we are. Personhood itself comes through other people. You do not become fully human alone, no matter how well fed you are. The Hebrew scriptures keep landing on the same note, where the deepest thing God says to somebody is not I will fix this, but I have called you by name. Being named is the intimacy. Hospitality traditions across the board carry a version of this too... that a guest crosses a threshold and becomes household rather than remaining a visitor.

Different words. Same conclusion. Nobody flourishes as a category.

This week

Small stuff. No gold stars, no guilt trips.

One: learn one useless thing about somebody you usually only interact with functionally. The person at the desk, your barista, the neighbor you wave at, somebody at whatever you volunteer with. Not their need. Something about their actual life. Then remember it and bring it up next time. (That second part is where it counts.)

Two: use somebody's name out loud who does not usually hear it from you. Get it right. Ask if you get it wrong.

Bonus round, and this one is harder than it sounds: let yourself be known too. Next time somebody asks how you are doing, tell them something true. Even something small. Being the one who is always fine keeps everybody else at arm's length, and I say that as a repeat offender.

Next time

I keep noticing that almost everything I have described happens around a table. The meal, the question cards, the coffee, the room full of folding chairs. That is not a coincidence, and it is not just because people like food. There is somethingabout a table that does work no program can do. It flattens hierarchy, it slows everybody down, it gives your hands a job so your mouth can say hard things. So next post is called "The Table Is the Technology." Why circles and meals and shared plates keep showing up in every tradition on earth, and why they still build trust across difference better than anything else we have come up with.

Until then, may somebody say your name correctly, may you learn something gloriously useless about a neighbor, and may you tell somebody how you are ACTUALLY doing.

Wishing you grace, peace, and every good...

Sam