How should we tell stories about people we’re trying to help?

Individuals, churches, missionaries, and nonprofit groups should ask this regularly. The answer is inextricably bound to the very justice we’re trying to promote. The question now has a perfect case study.

Joseph Kony recently became an Internet star through Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign. Among the millions of people who watched the video, no debate broke out about the evil of Kony, who as a warlord in central Africa maimed many and made children into killers. Worldwide consensus may be near impossible, but the cruelty inflicted by one of the world’s most wanted men can do that. The common goodwill the “Kony 2012″ video unleashed was encouraging. People want the best outcome for those in that region.

But a cyber-speed debate broke out over almost every other aspect of the campaign—sparking a discussion about the best policy, advocacy’s role, white man’s burden, interventionism, and the use of military force.

My prayers have been for Invisible Children’s co-founder Jason Russell’s recovery from a public breakdown and strength to continue working for justice. While I don’t focus on African policy issues, what has continued to interest me—what intersects with my profession as director of a nonprofit focused on education in Haiti—is the opportunity to think about this question of how “we” tell stories to help “them.”

To dive into this question, consider the dynamic of the Kony video and its aftermath, where two realities collided:

1. The audience (that is, us) craves simplicity of message, participation in meaningful positive change, and emotional reward—at low personal cost.

2. We (that is, “us” and “them”) each want to be treated with nuance and respect.

The Kony 2012 makers indisputably addressed this first reality brilliantly. Invisible Children took a risk, communicated their perspective powerfully, and started an important conversation.

For the second reality—the desire we each have to be treated “with nuance and respect”—it’s clear Invisible Children wanted people to treat them this way. They wanted people to consider the video within the context of their work, watch follow-up videos, read a Q&A, look at charts, and take their time assessing the situation. It was a fair request, because everyone deserves as much.

Whether they sufficiently did the same for people in northern Uganda was up for debate. Critiques came quickly about oversimplifying or mischaracterizing the situation, as well as disagreeing with how Ugandans were portrayed as victims to be saved by American college students. Others defended the portrayal as effective advocacy that didn’t answer all the questions but kickstarted an important movement that could lead toward more learning and positive influence on policy in the region.

We can all keep striving to better understand how to work toward justice not only with our actions, but also with how we tell people’s stories.

* * *

Jesus’ so-called Golden Rule should serve as the overarching guide: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7:12).

If you’ve ever talked about your experience on a short-term missions trip in front of your church, tried to start a new project for disadvantaged people in your neighborhood, or raised money to help others, at some point you might have felt an uncomfortable twinge: Did I make the case strongly enough to motivate people to step up and help? Did I selfishly make myself the hero? Did I paint people as one-dimensional victims instead of as the people I know them to be? Did I overstate how much good we’ve done? I know I’ve made these mistakes many times during my 15 years in nonprofit work.

Whether as individuals or multi-million dollar Christian development organizations, we need to be accountable for how we speak about each other—particularly about those who have less power than we do.

Articulating principles of a Golden Rule for communication can help align our speaking well with our doing good, align our speaking justly with doing justice.

Principle 1: People need a clear, compelling next step

Leaving the strategy/policy debate aside, Kony 2012 did this very well. Providing a clear, simple, emotionally compelling next step that builds into a larger strategy is harder than it sounds. Child sponsorship remains popular because of how it shows the next step: Help this one child.

My colleagues and I sometimes get too muddled in program details. Speaking at a university, sometimes I’ve finished telling moving stories, but then failed to help students know what small step to take next. The next step is, after all, the most important one. (After reading some of the Invisible Children critiques, I wanted to ask: So as an American, is there anything I should do to help, or nothing—and if so, what?)

The standard for truth doesn’t get lessened, but clear next steps are important.

Principle 2: The audience is who you’re talking to—and who you’re talking about

If you don’t serve your audience, they won’t serve others. What angle interests them? How will they relate? What questions will be in the back of their minds? How can you move their hearts and minds? Not asking these questions fails both the audience and the people you’re trying to help.

But I think the audience must also be who you’re speaking about, whether they’re present or not, whether speaking about a homeless person who lives around the block or someone who speaks another language in an electricity-less village thousands of miles away.

Why?

 Rest of the principles at Christianity Today here.

“From dust you were formed, to dust you shall return.” Those are the Ash Wednesday words. Ashes were rubbed in a cross on my forehead. Maybe on yours too.

I gave up soda for Lent. The weeks leading up were busy. Ash Wednesday was here; I hadn’t given much thought to this part of it. How petty to give up drinking bubbled sugar that, according to medical studies, will speed my return to dust.

And then I broke even that. A friend asked me if I wanted a Dr. Pepper. I wasn’t staying aware. Cold, crisp Dr. Pepper has undue power over me. It was a hot afternoon. A few minutes later my daughter asked from the back of the van if I just “broke Lent.” She’s six. I’m an idiot. A moment to talk about idiocy and grace.

She’s kept her Lent. On her own she came up with the idea of giving up her stuffed animals, what she calls “lovies.” Which makes sharper the question: my ridiculousness, can that one day return to dust too? You’ve got to hope for silver linings in the personal apocalypse.

I’m quite sure this says nothing good about my theology or piety, but here goes: I was much more disappointed about disappointing my daughter than about disappointing God.

Yet my faith is as strong as it ever is when I hear those words while being marked with ash.

A faith that turns celebration palm branches into the mark of death is a realistic faith in this world. A faith that turns the branches of a Christmas tree into a coarse cross confesses a roughed up hope that might endure, and be worth following, in this life.

In the end:

My body, to dust. The people I love, to dust. Our memories and accomplishments, to dust. Hopefully some of it lives on in goodness rippling out, but still, to dust.

My doubt, it will turn to dust. And so too my faith. Both proved right or wrong in their ways–either because it’s all only dust, or because then we will see face to face.

My sin, to dust. My hypocrisy, to dust.

Can the atheist and Christian celebrate Lent together? The atheist finding beauty, perhaps, by focusing on the ephemeral. The Christian finding beauty, perhaps, also beyond…by focusing on the ephemeral.

So we hurl forward toward Lent’s end.

It finishes with Maundy Thursday, Jesus washing feet, telling us to do the same. The grittiness of love: that we must keep rising out of dust to clean each other’s dust off.

No, it doesn’t end there. It finishes with Good Friday. I asked my daughter if she knew when Lent ended, back when we started, before I broke it with that cold, crisp Dr. Pepper. She said, “On Black Friday.” A wholly different and more cynical celebration of our mortality, that Friday is. I let it slide. Yes, on Good Friday then Lent must surely end, when the sky goes dark and the curtain is shorn. How much more can we take? Dust has darkened the sky.

No, it ends not there. Holy Saturday, that mysterious descending to the dead. Dust left in the dust. Doubters left huddling in a room, their hope lingering in a tomb. A limbo most of us can understand.

No, not then either. It doesn’t end there. Let’s hold on one more day. Let’s hold on till Easter morning, when Lent really ends into this crazy hope that Love itself rises from the dust. This crazy hope that Love can’t ultimately be ground down. Dust to dust, but also Life to Life.

(Written for Lenten series on Huffington Post.)

My thoughts, prayers, and work, my sadness and hope, are with people in Haiti today. I’ll be there all next week. A few links while reflecting on the earthquake and the two years since:

1. Today I did a “two years later” interview on Patheos that is here.

2. This prayer I wrote for the Washington Post a year ago, and I think it’s still my prayer: here.

3. Check out our two year updates on our Haiti Partners work here. My friend and colleague John doing a great 2-minute video report.

4. Also as a kind of prayer/psalm, you could watch this 2-minute After Shock video either over on the right side of this page or here.

5. Read the Spirit is rerunning an interview I’d done with them. Was a good conversation: here.

6. I’m on Miami’s PBS TV station for a panel discussion today. Will add a link when it airs and is online.

Just wrote a blog for InterVarsity looking back on their Urbana conference, which I attended with two friends from Haiti just two weeks before the earthquake two years ago. (A theme of twos in that previous sentence.) Thinking back on that event, what has happened since, and what is ahead. You can read it here: Just Before the Earth Shook.

(Wrote this for InterVarsity’s blog.)

I’ve never donned a beard or red suit for Christmas. So far that’s my personal line.

But something happens when you have kids. Categories of cool, kitsch, hip, tacky, etc., no longer matter much. It’s a short distance from this to mowing the lawn wearing black dress tube socks with sandals while wearing a Santa hat (I live in Florida; this is possible), but mostly the shift is a good, liberating change.

Why? Because you’re freed from caring what others think of you, and even a bit from what you think of you, into concentrating more on how you can love others. In this case, particularly for one’s children.

Our hand-me-down Christmas tree, though plastic, has lost half its needles, but I love it because my two-year-old son and six-year-old daughter love it. I hung Christmas lights on the house for the first time in my life. For the amount of effort and near falls off the little stepladder, it should have yielded a neighborhood spectacular. Instead we have one simple line of colorful LED icicles across the top of the garage. Yet the kids proudly cheered.

Last night I was preparing our kids to go to the town Christmas parade, which pre-progeny I would have avoided. Just before getting in the car I received a text from a family my wife and I remain very close to from our time living and working in Haiti.

The text’s essence: Sorry to bother you with this, but our families are hungry, all of us, including the children, and we’re struggling without enough money to buy food.

Takes a little of the “Ho, Ho, Ho!” out of the parade.

But not in a bad way. It’s never bad to be called to pay attention to love. I need reminders all the time, sometimes subtly, sometimes with a smack.

In this case, the reminder is to keep the ache of Advent—which means “coming”—alive in all its hope and discomfort.

We’re in a season of anticipating the incarnation, a once and done event in Jesus. But there’s still an awful ache for hopeful arrival, isn’t there?

For the message Jesus read from Isaiah at the opening of his ministry to be realized in our communities.

For that presence of grace and peace to be realized and renewed again in our lives.

For nobody to have to send a text like the one my friends sent yesterday.

So I don’t mind if the jolly, white-bearded one shows up in the parade, as long as another bearded one shows up prominently this season too: John the Baptist. This is Advent and Incarnation through Mark’s gospel, which doesn’t start with a birth narrative but with John shouting from the banks of the Jordan River, “Prepare the way.”

Because I think John the Baptist is a realist Santa, who instead of 50%-off shortcuts to what is jolly, actually points toward a realist route to a truer joy.

Repentance. Preparation. Humility. Judgment. Justice.

Scrooge, some would say, a list like that at Christmas time!

No, Scrooginess would be to obstruct real joy by settling for a counterfeit. I want generous helpings of the real thing, even if I would prefer milk and cookies to locusts and honey.

I want the liberating joy we can find when we care less about what others think of us and care more about pointing humbly toward the one who cares deeply about all of us.

I want joy that can survive (that doesn’t avoid, but responds to) the text I received from my friends in Haiti.

The jingling jolliness of this season is fun with my kids, but can’t survive adult reality. (Christmas commercialism is the market’s logical response to society’s arrested spiritual development.) Joy that can survive comes in glimpses of the good news John was preparing us for, that we await each Advent to come anew, because we desperately need to hear it all over again, year after year: that somehow God is with us, yes, even in all of this.

This is sublime joy that can endure, which arrives with Love itself being born, even unto us, in a stable of straw and muck.