Learning to Pray with Bailout Bill

Are you familiar with "Bailout Bill"? According to an article entitled "The Way We Beg" from Slate magazine, "Tuesday morning, a guy named Bailout Bill set up the Bailout Booth in Times Square and started giving away money. His visitors received anywhere between $50 to $1,000—no strings attached, no taxes to be filed. All you had to do was tell Bailout Bill why you needed the money." This brief intro to Bailout Bail could lead you to believe this is yet another blog post about grace. "I get it", you might be thinking, "We come to God and he freely gives to us". But this post is much more about need than it is about grace.

For Bailout Bill turns out to be less charitable than he seems. Sadly, those who were not able to make it to the booth in time were directed to a web site in which they could post their desperate requests in a forum (please do not finish this without checking out at least a couple posts). Bailout Bill would then pick a couple of pleas a day and offer relief to the lucky ones in need. However, as noted in the article, it is actually a video-classified ad-site offering risky loans. The relief appears to be only for the sake of baiting the suffering into a pretty dark business.

At the same time, this forum has become a remarkable window into the brokenness of thousands of everyday Americans. Some posts are brief - simply asking for cash. Others provide detailed narratives of profound tragedy, including, but not limited to bouts with cancer, the loss of a job, abandonment by a spouse, or all of the above. These individuals, along with their children and extended families, need immediate relief today. In America, people are rarely willing to put their suffering on such public display. It is often something considered to be private and or shameful. We do this, though, when offered even the most remote promise of hope. This virtual bulletin board of grief seems vaguely reminiscent of the impromptu, make-shift displays after 9/11 seeking to locate missing relatives.

Like those boards, this forum reminds of us of two central realities of the human experience - the lack of control and delusion of self-sufficiency. In this time of economic crisis, we are reminded that these two concepts - perhaps the most essential tenets of American identity - are truly beyond our reach. Right now, most people will admit their inability to control the circumstances of their lives, including their health, relationships, and especially their finances. At the same time, our nation's recent woes have proven that the romanticism of self-sufficiency is more a curse than it is a blessing. Even many high-rollers on Wall Street have been challenged to consider whether self-sufficency really is the existential mirage it seems to be at this moment.

With powerful insight, the author of "The Way We Beg" articulates this much better:

"Either the visitors want Bailout Bill to know he’d be doing them a favor ("it would be a big help"), or they’re putting the onus on Bill ("please help"). Either way, it’s a reflection of the recession’s ability to strip its victims of agency. We need the help because we are helpless."

To me, these prayers to Bailout Bill sound like the most desperate of human pleas before God. In fact, most of us could learn a great deal on how to pray from this message forum. Praise be to the one that stands with us in the midst of suffering, while directing us to the only one proving sufficient.

(And if you think about it, you could certainly pray for these people and their situations - again, please visit this site to hear their stories. . . )