On missions

It's a job that will, I'm sure, fall to me; and it'll happen sometime soon. My father-in-law may not make it to his 100th birthday, even though that birthday is less than a month away. When death comes, I'll be assigned his obituary. It's already composing itself in my mind--how to say what needs to be said about a quiet, unassuming, wonderful man.

That's why wheelchairs have been in my mind for a couple of weeks already, wheelchairs he worked on as if repairing them were his 8 to 5 job and not just a volunteer thing. Somewhere in his room at the home, there are about a dozen metal badges that once hung from an award he received for his years of service. The award is on his wall.

What do you do with a thousand home-grown fixer-up talents when you're a retired farmer whose machine shed is back on the acreage some young family now calls home? How do you keep your hands occupied once you're too old to climb ladders to roof houses? What do you do with hands that can't stop working, even though there's not much left to do?

For him, the wheelchair business was a God-sent. It kept his hands busy and his mind sharp. It gave him a place to go, buddies to work with, and coffee and day-old donuts that never tasted quite as good.

Fixing up wheelchairs gave him a mission. Besides, there were hundreds of them. Fix 'em up and ship 'em out across the world to needy folks of all ages who, as if by miracle, found themselves miraculously blessed with mobility they'd never known before.

Rebuilding wheelchairs was no daily grind; it was a blessing, not only for him, but for the young and old whose pictures he kept in his desk drawer. The whole endeavor was--and still is--a noble ministry for old bucks like my dad. Once upon a time, he and his GI buddies followed the front from Normandy to Berlin in the motor pool, a traveling machine shed that repaired tanks and jeeps and trucks and whatever could be fixed and returned to battle.

The wheelchair business may have lacked the drama and the firepower of a shot-up Deuce-and-a-Half, but, if you think about it, those two jobs weren't much different--their end games was liberation. 

Just last Sunday, the wheelchair mission was the featured ministry for our church offerings. Before the plate was passed, a short video played up on the screen, a series of shots of recipients from around the world sitting in those wheelchairs he'd spent all that volunteer time redeeming. Thanksgiving was written all over the faces of old men and women, and a score of children who may never have taken a step under their own power. It was beautiful.

For the last few years, my education has come by way of a curriculum created by a Native American woman just as old my father-in-law--she'll be 100 in October. She too was in Europe for the war, a nurse at Battle of the Bulge. 

But by way of her life story, she has taught me a history I never learned in school. Through glimpses of a life unlike any I'd ever seen or experienced, she gave me a more expansive view of a words like justice and even love. That education has affected me, made me see things differently. It hasn't so much converted me to a new kind of faith as it has sharpened my perceptions about my history and my life.

Despite my father-in-law's decades-long gift to that wheelchair ministry, I couldn't help but feel as if the video of all those needy people gaining independence some of them never had, carried a frightful load of unintended and even insidious freight because the saviors were all--every last one of them--white folks; while the needy were all--every last one of them--people of color. 

I love the wheelchair ministry. With his hands, my father-in-law must have repaired hundreds of wheelchairs. Somewhere in his desk drawer, he has pictures of some of the very units he reconditioned. It's a wonderful mission in every way.

But it was impossible for me not to read the racial element embodied in that video because I know a whole lot of ugliness, through history, has risen from the self-righteousness of there being a "white man's burden."

"Wheelchair" is a glorious thing, really, but I can't help but think the ministry needs to look for another way to tell its own blessed story.