In 2001 I volunteered for almost a year at an inner city middle school. My role was to walk the hallways with a walkie talkie, ensuring that there were no stray students walking around without a pass.
Quite often I was called to come to classrooms to break up fights, and I’d walk in to find kids throwing desks at each other, brawling, or trying to stab one another with pencils. My role was to break up the fight, and take the offenders into a room, one at a time, to try to find out what happened and why. The nature of those conversations changed my perspective on life and ministry forever.
In each conversation I would try to calm the kid down, and then I would ask them the same basic question: Don’t you know that your education is the key to your future? And I’d follow it up with, what do you want to be when you grow up? I was shocked by their responses, or their lack of responses, to be more precise. Not one of those kids had a real answer to either of those questions. They didn’t have any sense of tomorrow, and so they saw no real significance in today.
I tried and tried to impart a sense of hope, of future, of opportunity to these kids, but it was just no use. Then I discovered Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, and it all made sense!
Maslow said that there are five basic levels of human needs, and we don’t become conscious of an upper level until the lower levels are satisfied. According to Maslow, the hierarchy begins with food and shelter, then safety and security, then love and acceptance, then self-confidence, then self-actualization. The problem with my approach to these children was that I was expecting them to desire self-actualization (the fulfillment of their potential) when many of them didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, and almost none of them knew what it was like to feel safe or secure.
Maslow’s schema taught me that when people don’t feel any desire to grow, to move forward, to do something meaningful with their lives, it is because they are missing something more fundamental. It is almost impossible to pursue the future when your present is unstable.
So then, how do we help people who don’t seem to want to grow? The short answer is simple: if you are ministering to someone who doesn’t seem to want to grow, find out what need is missing, and fill it! If they’re hungry, feed them. If they don’t feel safe, let your presence be a source of safety for them. If they need love and acceptance, love and accept them. Once they feel accepted, they will begin to long for self-confidence, and that’s when you can build them up and point them towards their future!
Ministering to people this way is powerful and effective, but there are three things you should keep in mind as you seek to do so:
1. You are one piece, not the whole puzzle. You will never be able to fully satisfy even one of these needs for any one human being, so don’t allow yourself to feel like a failure if you fall short. Your acts of kindness may seem small to you, but they are monumental in a life that has been deprived of these things.
2. Change happens progressively, not immediately. The desire to grow develops in us as our basic needs are met. But the meeting of these needs is much more than an episodic phenomenon. Consistency must be established in order for a person to feel that the need has been satisfied and the problem solved. Be patient; change will happen, but it will most likely take time.
3. Share the burden. Don’t try to be the exclusive answer for anything or anyone. This breeds dependency in them and resentment in you, and it could even create a co-dependent situation. Get others involved so that the whole burden is not on you.
Blessings to you as you seek to help people make decisions that will move them forward in life. And blessings to you as you seek to make such decisions yourself. As you seek to meet the needs of others, may God send people to meet your needs as well.
Share your thoughts:
Are there areas of your life in which you can’t seem to find the drive, or the desire to grow, even though you know deep inside that you need to grow? Does this post help you understand where that comes from?
