No Such Thing as Wasted Love

a reflection on helpers' heartbreak

love is messy, and sometimes fades, but remains nonetheless

I got a Facebook message earlier today from someone who is up to good trouble on behalf of unhoused people in Central CA. She shared with me a story that felt all too familiar.

She and some co-conspirators had rallied together to help a young man get out of the cycle of homelessness and enrolled in college—fully set up in the dorms with a new laptop and some other needed items. Things were going really well for a couple months and then communication started to dwindle. He stopped attending classes, returning calls, and then just disappeared. She messaged me not so much for advice, but to commiserate with someone who knows this unique weariness and disappointment.

I know it all too well. I’ve housed people who ended up back on the streets. I’ve helped people get crucial, timely medical care only for symptoms to reemerge. I’ve spent months lining up opportunities only for people to not show up when the time came. I’ve seen people relapse, and even overdose, after courageous bouts of recovery.

To do this work well, and to sustain it over a long, is to contain multitudes of empathy and patience. The best case managers I’ve known and work with have nothing but compassion for when people mess up, fall short, or self-sabotage. They know it is not laziness or intransigence or helplessness, but deeply rooted fear, trauma, anxiety, and depression that lead to this. Nonetheless, we all still feel the disappointment and disbelief when so much work and progress feel like they amount to nothing.

In the moments of helpers’ heartbreak, I tell myself and others something that has to be true:

There is no such thing as wasted love.

No amount of care, compassion, empathy, or connection are lost just because things don’t end up the way that we hope. I believe this with the entirety of my being—the love that we experience and all the progress we make is stored deeply within us, filling a well that we can draw on later in moments of crisis. Every ounce of tenderness, every step taken toward flourishing and wholeness, are bricks laid toward a foundation of resilience.

I believe this in an intangible, existential way, but also in a very practical way. I’ve seen it be true over and over again that every next try is strengthened by every previous try. “Practice makes perfect” isn’t just about learning a sport or instrument, but is how we learn life too. When someone moves into their first apartment after years of homelessness, it might not go perfectly. But the second one will go better. Where some people see someone “failing” over and over, I choose to notice the ways a person succeeds a little bit more each time.

In the story above, the folks who rallied together might have some disappointment—Should we have spent all that money? Maybe they wish they had spared the expense of the new laptop, if not all of it. But the goal was never the laptop, or the tuition money—it was the potential for safety, community, education, hope, and new possibility. And those things were not wasted. He takes those with him, wherever he goes next, and can call on them when the time is right.

Because love is never lost, connection is never wasted, and every bit of progress raises the floor for the future. May we be generous in giving these resources, and ever open to receiving them ourselves.

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