When the World is on Fire and You are a Drop in a Bucket: Reflections on December at Sycamore House

This past December my housemate Faith and I participated in an international campaign called Dressember. We each committed to wearing a dress everyday throughout the month of December in order to raise money and awareness to fight against human trafficking. I was skeptical it would have any impact, but I hate wearing pants and I thought it would be a fun way to bond with my housemate. I learned two things. One, hope is hard. Two, working with other people makes hope easier.

Sweating for a Cause

I suck at hope. I’m good at suffering. I’m not sure if it is my depression, or having had a friend die at a relatively young age, but I tent to default to “the world is chaos and madness and suffering.”

Needless to say, I don’t do very well with the holidays. As I grew up, Christmas started to feel like a season of working really hard to be pretend to be happy because you are supposed to be. And when you’re not happy, the nativity scene is a frustrating reminder that you should be rejoicing.

Throughout December, I was feeling really overwhelmed. I was learning lots of new, depressing information about how I am complicit in human trafficking. I was hearing stories from people who have spent more time in prison than I have on this earth, Australia was LITERALLY on fire, and for about a week or so there we almost went to war with Iran.

Meanwhile, I was wearing a dress and asking for money. In the face of an evil as large as human trafficking doing something as small and simple as wearing a dress felt naïve at best, and self-indulgent at worst. But if there is one thing I have learned from the Christmas story it is that hope shows up in unexpected places.

This advent, I was very struck by different artistic interpretations of the nativity scene. One that went viral depicted Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as a family separated at the border. It was a reminder that in our nativity story, God chose to come into this world through a brown skinned woman and a family of persecuted refugees. So if hope can show up there, why couldn’t it show up through an internet campaign?

I’m impatient. I don’t want to sit around and expect and hope and wait for a 2nd coming of Christ. And I certainly don’t want to be told “Rejoice!” and “Do not be afraid” while I am waiting. Because the world is on fire. And I feel like a drop in a bucket.

But here is the thing about water droplets: My housemate Faith and I raised over 1,500 dollars for Dressember. To date, the campaign has raised several million dollars to fight against human trafficking. When I am too busy being paralyzed, staring in agony at the flames, someone else already called the fire department.

I think this is why I need the Christmas story over and over again every year. Because each year it encourages me to hope in the face of despair. To me, Hope in the face of despair is a radical act. Literally radical, meaning it starts at the root. For me, the root is our common humanity. The root is being a water droplet, and finding other water droplets to link up with so that just maybe you can keep the flames at bay.