A Faith Oriented Life

by Amanda Leff

     “Catherine, did you hear I’m getting a TV on Tuesday?” asks a young woman with cropped dark hair. “What for?” Catherine replies with a confused look on her usually smiling face. “I need it. I ain’t got one.” To this Catherine responds, “Maybe you need to redefine need and want.”
     This conversation takes place at a dinner for the community members of Athens, Ohio, in rural Appalachia, a notoriously poor part of the country. Catherine Lachman, 27, is a supervisor at Good Works, the ministry that hosts these free dinners every Friday. The dinners are located in the gymnasium of a church during the late fall and winter months, and in a park pavilion during the warmer months. Most attendants are either homeless or in the process of establishing a stable shelter. The meal is prepared and served by volunteers. A local home-schooling group is cooking this week’s meal. A team of moms work tirelessly in the kitchen to serve about 120 hungry mouths.
     God led Catherine to Good Works in the spring of 2002 after earning her master’s degree in counseling from Ohio University. She wasn’t sure of her fate after her graduation. She waited patiently for His direction, which was revealed to her when the opportunity at Good Works was offered to her. Initially, she worked as a care-giver in the Timothy House, the ministry’s homeless shelter that has a maximum capacity of 15 residents. Her duties included some social work and counseling elements. Today she supervises the care-giving staff, but still has daily contact with the residents.
     In addition to her routine responsibilities supervising within the shelter, Catherine coordinates and attends the community dinner every Friday. She moves through the crowds of people with the grace of a dancer. Pausing in between chores to greet guests and offer support to those who recount the struggles they have been facing. She looks deep into their eyes and nods sympathetically; opens her arms to embrace them when they cry. The dinners are full of happy times, too. Light-hearted banter fills the church gymnasium punctuated by spurts of laughter. Catherine flashes her brilliant smile while exchanging pleasantries with the guests. Her fingers twirl her light blonde hair as she listens to people’s stories. When Catherine is engaged in a conversation, she uses her hands to help speak her mind.
     Catherine loves to interact with the guests at dinner, but she absolutely glows around children. Her entire face brightens when she is speaking to a child. It is even more pronounced when she is greeting a baby. Her eyes widen to reveal huge blue eyes, and she raises her eyebrows in the highest arch possible. Her smile expands and her voice goes several octaves higher. Kimmy, a two-year-old regular at the dinner, has an obvious adoration for Catherine—it appears to be mutual. Bobbing around in a striped shirt and pink pants, Kimmy seems to not have a care in the world. She trots up to Catherine and immediately begins to giggle. Catherine scoops up the child and kisses her cheeks relentlessly, leaving Kimmy squealing with joy. This scene repeats itself several times throughout the evening.
     Amid all of the socializing, Catherine manages to make sure the dinner runs smoothly. She gets out supplies, such as coffee cups and extra forks, and periodically checks in on the kitchen to make sure the volunteers have everything under control. On one particular trip through the kitchen she lingers to marvel at the food spread across the counters. She lifts the lid of one of the crock-pots filled with a mixture of chicken, corn, and black beans. She leans in to smell the savory juices. “Oh, dinner is going to be so good tonight.”
     It is almost time for dinner to be served, and the guests are hungrily awaiting their meal of chicken, rice, cornbread, and salad. The children amuse themselves with the basketball hoop at the other end of the gym. “I don’t like the time before dinner because it’s unstructured, and people are just filling up the place,” Catherine says. “I also don’t like after dinner because it’s mayhem. Kids run around everywhere, and I have to be like, ‘Ahhhhh! Are those kids under the bleachers?’” But dinner is quite a different story for her, “Dinner is great.”
     The volunteers who prepare the meal sit with the guests. This allows these two very different groups to interact in a way they normally would not. A financially secure person does not often sit down to have a meal with the homeless.
     The weekly dinner is just a small part of what Good Works is all about. The Good Works ministry describes itself as a community of hope where people struggling with homelessness, poverty and recovery issues can experience God’s love, identify their faith, and develop hope. “Good Works is about restoring dignity and hope to people. It’s about being a community,” Catherine said.
     Though Catherine has helped many people in her three years at Good Works, she believes God put her there for specific reasons. “I needed to learn how you can’t separate a Christian life from caring about people that God cares about. He cares about the underdog. He cares about people who are oppressed. He cares about people who don’t have a voice that anyone listens to.”
     The necessity of fighting for justice is another lesson Catherine learned through Good Works. “If you ignore injustice, you’re not focusing on the people that God wants you to focus on. That’s what I’ve learned by looking into the faces of the people I work with every day—the people who are unfairly evicted, the people who are picked on because of their mental illness, the people who work as hard as they can and still can’t make enough money to feed their kids—the people who don’t have any hope for anything better.” In her past, she ignored injustice because it was not brought to her attention and because of the sacrifices involved with fighting for justice. She said people should use Jesus, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Theresa as examples of great justice fighters in their own lives. People who really care for those who suffer must give up something huge, she said. “They sacrifice their comfort, their safety, and sometimes their freedom.”
     When you fight against injustice you anger powerful people, she said. She used Jesus’ life as an example. He was ultimately killed because He was critical of unjust rulers. Catherine acknowledges the risks involved with fighting for justice and realizes not many people are willing to endure the sacrifices. “It can be painful,” she said. “When I think of the truth of my faith and what it brings me, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But there are no guarantees that it is going to be easy.”
     Loving your enemies does not come easily because your natural reaction is to hate your enemies, she said. “It’s hard to love people when they don’t love you back.” Catherine tells her staff at Good Works that people who look to be complimented and thanked for their efforts will not survive the long haul. “We are constantly trying to challenge each other to get our thank you’s from God. God is pleased with what we’re doing—with what I’m doing. And that is what’s important, even if I never get another thank you from a person.”
     Catherine’s faith is evident in all aspects of her life. Keith Wasserman, founder and executive director of Good Works, said Catherine is anchored through her trust in God with her life and her responsibilities. “Her faith comes through by the way she looks at her circumstances and the way she lives at a higher level than her circumstances and emotions. She is ruled by a desire to honor God in all that she does.” Keith considers Catherine’s partnership in Good Works a gift from God. “It is easy to have respect and confidence in her because of her integrity. There is no difference between the Catherine who isn’t working and Catherine who is. She is the same person through and through.”
     In Catherine’s line of work she sees no instant gratification of people who get better; the road of progress is long for most people. “I have to have a hope that goes beyond what I can see,” she said. “I have to have the faith that what I’m doing makes an impact beyond the tangible things I can see.” She does see remarkable stories of progress and knows the people she works with have hope beyond their immediate circumstances. “You have to have hope for change,” she said. “A huge thing for my faith has been that you have to have hope that the oppressive systems can change, and you have to hope that the individual people you’re working with can change.”
     The same faith that led her to Good Works ultimately led her to her husband Ben Lachman. Ben is an Ohio University student who grew up in Athens. He met Catherine while volunteering at the weekly Good Works dinner. The couple began spending time together. They talked in coffee shops, went to concerts, and allowed their friendship to grow. Though there is a five year age difference, Catherine and Ben began to date. “I really enjoyed spending time with her and talking to her,” Ben said one morning in a coffee shop with his arm linked through Catherine’s. “You really can’t ask for much more at the beginning of a relationship.”
     Once they began dating, Ben discovered how much he admired her, and he admires her more every day. The couple married in August 2004 in what was the largest wedding the Athens Community Center has ever hosted with more than 300 guests.
     Despite their busy schedules, the newlyweds spend as much time together as possible. “He’s a wonderful support, and I think we balance each other. We each have strengths where the other has weakness, and I think that makes us stronger as a couple. We can encourage each other to grow.” Ben said their relationship works because of their faith and commitment to being disciples of Jesus. However, like most couples, they have their differences. With a smile, Ben said he is the more methodical one in the relationship, while Catherine tends to get excited about things very easily. Ben explained Catherine’s most recent burst of excitement which surrounded her impulsive idea to buy run-down student rentals and make renovations to turn them into low-income housing. “She had it all planned out, and she thought about it for probably 15 minutes or a half hour. She came home from work and had this idea completely planned out.”
     The life lessons Catherine has learned at Good Works carry through all aspects of her life. Her mother Pam Liggett believes working at the ministry has made her daughter more aware of what people don’t have. “If she had enough food for one meal and you didn’t have any, she’d share her food,” Pam said. “She’s not a spender. She’s not a shopper.” That system of belief carries through all things in her life, even her wedding. Catherine was considerate of her bride maids’ financial situations by having her mother and a friend make the dresses for $30 each. On a similar note, Catherine did not want a bridal registry. Pam remembers Catherine saying, “I want people to come to the wedding and have a good time. We don’t need gifts.” Realizing the newlyweds would be needing things for their home, Pam tried to convince the couple to register for gifts. Though they were not happy about it, Catherine and Ben compromised and registered for a few items at a well known department store and requested artwork by local artists.
     Once Ben graduates in the spring with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, the couple plans to do missionary work in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) in the fall. Catherine will end her time with Good Works in August and very soon after they will work with close friends who are already on the mission ministering and teaching English. Plans are tentative because the country’s political instability could cause problems with obtaining visas and other preparations for the trip.
     Catherine views the trip as a chance to broaden her perspective by seeing the way Christians live in another culture. She hopes to help people, but she realizes she does not need to go overseas to make a difference. “We could help people here as easily as we could help people there.” She wants to get closer to God and increase her faith through the mission.
     Catherine believes that God works in her life today by teaching her how to work together in marriage and to persevere in her work. “Every once in a while, I get to a place where I realize that I’ve probably been dependent on my own strengths too much and God kind of reminds me that I don’t get very far that way because I don’t have a lot of my own strengths. It brings me back to needing to depend on Him.”