Offering a little help
11/06/15 05:25
When I was a young pastor in rural North Dakota we didn’t have out of town guests very often. Most of the time our attention was focused on serving the people who lived in our town. From time to time we’d have contact with someone who was traveling through our town and needed assistance, however. Perhaps a car would break down and repairs be expensive enough that money for gas and food and lodging was short. In that town we had a community thrift shop that produced a modest income and the pastors of the community had organized a system of gas, motel and meal vouchers that could be used to help people. Our church wasn’t the largest church building in town, though its location was close to the center of the community. From time to time I would be called upon to do what I could to help.
I learned a lot from those few experiences. I learned that not every story you are told is true. I learned that some people would take some really big risks, traveling long distances without sufficient resources, making it from town to town basically on the mercy of handouts. I learned that asking for help was a survival skill for some people - it was how they got through life. I learned that people would skip meals in order to keep going on trips whose reasons seemed to me to be very shaky.
A couple of times in those years I met people who had traveled to the northern part of our state in search of jobs in the oil fields. There was quite a bit of exploration in the Williston Basin at the time, though many of the discoveries didn’t lead to production for decades because of the high costs of horizontal drilling. Some of the oil that has been extracted in the past few years had to wait for the development of newer technologies before it could be profitably extracted.
The dream was that there were plenty of high paying jobs of unskilled workers. That dream became a rumor and people would leave behind everything they had in an attempt to make it to the area to seek jobs. Upon arriving they discovered that the jobs were all filled, or that they required special skills. They also discovered that the region didn’t have inexpensive housing and that groceries were more expensive than in other locations. With old and battered cars and only a few gallons of gas in the tank, they would wander from town to town trying to make it back home, often without really having a place to call home, only a dream or a promise of some other job.
That was many years ago, but the stream of people going to and from the oilfields continues. Just a few years ago the Williston Basin was booming. Locals were developing strategies to expand their businesses into the area and to provide services for all of the oilfield traffic that was going through our area heading north to the basin. There were stories of locals who made thousands of dollars renting out homes or speculating on a bare field that could be transformed into a trailer park. There were stories of companies that would pay high wages just to get a welder or a mechanic to work some shifts. There were stories of people sleeping in their cars lining up to get high paying jobs.
It was late last year when global oil prices collapsed. The price of a barrel was around $110 and it fell to about $45. When the price drops, the oil companies shut down wells, or at least refrain from the expense of drilling new ones. Where there had been plenty of very high paying jobs, suddenly there are none.
The price has bounced back a little - around $60 per barrel. That price, however, isn’t enough to produce a profit in many domestic oil fields. One report that I read estimated that around 17,000 jobs in the oil and gas industry were lost in May of this year.
That means more people in vehicles of questionable quality trying to make miles with insufficient dollars. And even though the price of gas has dropped form its levels of a year ago, small institutions like churches can’t afford to buy very much to help traveling strangers.
There really aren’t many high paying jobs for those who don’t have college educations. Globalization and increased automation in factories have eliminated many jobs that once were the staple of urban economies across the country. The jobs that are left - construction labor, retail trade and government service - all pay lower wages. And it is hard to feed a family on minimum wage.
The oil fields, where the majority of the jobs do not require a college education, offer promise when the price is up and the industry is booming. When it goes bust, as it does in a cyclical economy, families can see their income drop by 50%, 60% or 70%.
Things will change. The price of oil will go up. Companies will be hiring again. But no one knows when that will happen. And, when it does, there will be a surge of jobs, a surge of spending, and another bust. It is the way that economy works.
The result of this is that we never are able to meet all of the needs that we see. There are problems that we are unable to solve. We can help with a tank of gas here, a meal there, but the impact of churches on the big picture of the economy is minimal.
Challenges that are too big for our resources are part of a way of life for those of us who serve others. We often have more need than resources. We often go home with unfinished work and unsolved problems at the end of the day. We don’t have illusions about our abilities to “fix” the problems of the world.
What we can do is listen to the people and show our concern. And, once in a while, we can help a little bit. And occasionally - rarely - a little help is sufficient. That is enough to keep us going.
I learned a lot from those few experiences. I learned that not every story you are told is true. I learned that some people would take some really big risks, traveling long distances without sufficient resources, making it from town to town basically on the mercy of handouts. I learned that asking for help was a survival skill for some people - it was how they got through life. I learned that people would skip meals in order to keep going on trips whose reasons seemed to me to be very shaky.
A couple of times in those years I met people who had traveled to the northern part of our state in search of jobs in the oil fields. There was quite a bit of exploration in the Williston Basin at the time, though many of the discoveries didn’t lead to production for decades because of the high costs of horizontal drilling. Some of the oil that has been extracted in the past few years had to wait for the development of newer technologies before it could be profitably extracted.
The dream was that there were plenty of high paying jobs of unskilled workers. That dream became a rumor and people would leave behind everything they had in an attempt to make it to the area to seek jobs. Upon arriving they discovered that the jobs were all filled, or that they required special skills. They also discovered that the region didn’t have inexpensive housing and that groceries were more expensive than in other locations. With old and battered cars and only a few gallons of gas in the tank, they would wander from town to town trying to make it back home, often without really having a place to call home, only a dream or a promise of some other job.
That was many years ago, but the stream of people going to and from the oilfields continues. Just a few years ago the Williston Basin was booming. Locals were developing strategies to expand their businesses into the area and to provide services for all of the oilfield traffic that was going through our area heading north to the basin. There were stories of locals who made thousands of dollars renting out homes or speculating on a bare field that could be transformed into a trailer park. There were stories of companies that would pay high wages just to get a welder or a mechanic to work some shifts. There were stories of people sleeping in their cars lining up to get high paying jobs.
It was late last year when global oil prices collapsed. The price of a barrel was around $110 and it fell to about $45. When the price drops, the oil companies shut down wells, or at least refrain from the expense of drilling new ones. Where there had been plenty of very high paying jobs, suddenly there are none.
The price has bounced back a little - around $60 per barrel. That price, however, isn’t enough to produce a profit in many domestic oil fields. One report that I read estimated that around 17,000 jobs in the oil and gas industry were lost in May of this year.
That means more people in vehicles of questionable quality trying to make miles with insufficient dollars. And even though the price of gas has dropped form its levels of a year ago, small institutions like churches can’t afford to buy very much to help traveling strangers.
There really aren’t many high paying jobs for those who don’t have college educations. Globalization and increased automation in factories have eliminated many jobs that once were the staple of urban economies across the country. The jobs that are left - construction labor, retail trade and government service - all pay lower wages. And it is hard to feed a family on minimum wage.
The oil fields, where the majority of the jobs do not require a college education, offer promise when the price is up and the industry is booming. When it goes bust, as it does in a cyclical economy, families can see their income drop by 50%, 60% or 70%.
Things will change. The price of oil will go up. Companies will be hiring again. But no one knows when that will happen. And, when it does, there will be a surge of jobs, a surge of spending, and another bust. It is the way that economy works.
The result of this is that we never are able to meet all of the needs that we see. There are problems that we are unable to solve. We can help with a tank of gas here, a meal there, but the impact of churches on the big picture of the economy is minimal.
Challenges that are too big for our resources are part of a way of life for those of us who serve others. We often have more need than resources. We often go home with unfinished work and unsolved problems at the end of the day. We don’t have illusions about our abilities to “fix” the problems of the world.
What we can do is listen to the people and show our concern. And, once in a while, we can help a little bit. And occasionally - rarely - a little help is sufficient. That is enough to keep us going.