What it means to flourish like a ‘watered garden’

OPINION:

The word “flourish” is making a comeback. Its use in literature since 1980 has nearly doubled.

Maybe its resurgence is connected to the search for it not the word, but for the life that reflects it. Indeed, the first wave of findings from the Global Flourishing Study revealed the younger crowd has much less hope for a flourishing future than those who’ve passed midlife.

But what does it mean to have a flourishing life, and how do we help people achieve it?

I’ve spent over two decades trying to help those in poverty do this, and it can be hard for them to envision what that might look like. As Stephen, one of our long-term residents who had come into adulthood through poverty, abuse and addiction, shared with me, “All I ever knew was the dregs of life. I never knew anything could be different until I came here. Now I have a new family.”

There’s an ancient prescription of sorts in the Bible: “The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones; You shall be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail” (Isaiah 58:11). This promise of direction, provision, strength and a vibrant life is as fine a description of a flourishing life as any.

However, the prior verses in Isaiah emphasize that it’s a promise contingent on how we interact with one another, particularly the poor. Depending on your translation, at one point, Isaiah 58:10 instructs those caring for the hungry to go beyond just handing out food and “extend your soul” or “give yourself” to them. That call to be relational in our charity is a waypoint to a flourishing society. Without it, we’re lost.

Just consider the alternative: faceless charity that mostly reaches the poor through a handout from the cold hands of a complicated bureaucracy, far from those actually struggling. Attempts to solve the problem through handouts and welfare have been the mainstay for more than 60 years. Yet the flourishing life remains elusive. Why? Primarily because the simple redistribution of wealth fails to deliver what relationships can: belonging, inspiration and accountability.

Moreover, it cuts real opportunity off at the knees by crowding out civil society’s response to poverty (where social capital is developed) and diminishing on-ramps to the marketplace (where wealth is created).

For example, a private, volunteer-driven medical clinic for uninsured people in southwest Missouri discontinued its services. When I asked why, one director told me, “Every time we send a person for a diagnostic exam, they end up on Medicaid and then don’t come back.” They had many testimonies about the transformative relationships between volunteers and the poor who came in need; yet, those were crowded out by a welfare program.

Or consider moments when civil society steps in after the government steps out. When $146 million of prisoner re-entry funding was cut in our state, a local church stepped up to help ex-felons re-enter the workforce through services, supplies, and most importantly, relationships that convey values necessary for success.

The development of relationships between those who are poor and those who aren’t is called bridging social capital. Recent research makes the case that these relationships are vital for the poor to flourish economically. Consistently, the poor who have relational connections to those who are prosperous have higher rates of upward income mobility.

No less important than a civil-society-first approach is to ensure our policies and charity don’t dissuade people from getting a job or advancing in the one they have.

In Greene County, Missouri, as soon as a single parent’s earned income moves from $32,000 to $33,000, there is a net loss in welfare benefits of more than $12,000. This presents an obvious disincentive to advance in the workforce. Indeed, as welfare spending has risen, the labor force participation rate of working-age males has declined. In the mid-1960s, one in 30 working-age men was absent from the workforce; today, it’s one in 10.

There are a lot of costs to a diminishing workforce, but human dignity takes the biggest hit. Any time our charity, whether public or private, diminishes the drive of a person to contribute what he can for something that he needs, human dignity is diminished. The on-ramp to the marketplace of work starts with our charity having expectations that communicate, “I believe in you.” The alternative is a life of dependency that devolves into learned helplessness.

Real compassion compels this kind of charity to give ourselves to people who are struggling in poverty. In the middle and the mess of the relationships that ensue, we find a life “like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.”

The real justice, though, is that when we practice that in our own communities, joining with the poor relationally and welcoming them into circles of exchange, we extend the same Isaiah 58 promise to them, as well the hope to flourish.

• James Whitford is the founder and executive director of Watered Gardens Ministries in Joplin, MO, and True Charity, a nationwide movement of churches and nonprofits committed to effective, dignity-preserving solutions to poverty. He is also the author of “The Crisis of Dependency: How Our Efforts to Solve Poverty Are Trapping People in It and What We Can Do to Foster Freedom Instead.”