When You Think of Poverty...

I heard my name called quietly amid the noise of the food distribution. It was the last batey we were visiting that day and the sun was intense, waiting patiently for our truck to drive out from under the protection of the shade tree and back into its full strength. The afternoon breeze was kicking up the dust and flinging it into our eyes.

Leaving my work, I stood up and made my way over to the driver’s side of the truck. Our driver, Ariel, was sitting in the front with a small group of people surrounding the open door. I made my way into the group and looked expectantly at Ariel, waiting to see what the problem was.

 “They say this boy just came from Haiti and was dropped off by someone here this morning,” Ariel began, his face sober and expressing an emotion I couldn’t quite place. Pity? Sympathy? I rarely saw him as serious as he was now. “The man who dropped him off told him he was going to the next town to pick something up and that he would be back, but he hasn’t returned.” He nodded his head toward a boy I hadn’t noticed right away, and I finally started to understand the situation. This boy was an illegal immigrant, and he had crossed the border with someone and been left behind in a batey where he knew no one.

He spoke no Spanish. Using the little Creole I know I asked him his name. To respect his privacy I will call him Emmanuel. We had some of the batey community members translate our questions and slowly we found out more of his story:

Emmanuel was fourteen years old. The man who took him across the border was not a family member. This was his very first day in the Dominican Republic. The man told him to wait here until he came back, but hours had passed and still he hadn’t returned. I asked the people listening where Emmanuel was going to stay tonight.

“On the street,” a girl proclaimed, with no shame or hesitation.

“Who is going to take care of him here?” I asked, my anger rising with my voice.

“Nobody knows who he is,” they told me. “We can’t trust people anymore.” Their answer was simple, but effective. My anger remained, but it was not directed at them. That’s part of an impoverished life. People hurt you, take advantage of you so many times that eventually you can’t trust anyone you don’t know. This boy could be lying about everything; he could be waiting for someone to weaken and allow him in, and then he will take all of their stuff. No, Emmanuel might be able to expect a meal from someone who takes pity on him, but in all likelihood there would be no bed waiting for him tonight.

Throughout my conversation with the locals Emmanuel remained motionless. He never smiled, never frowned, never showed any kind of emotion. His face was passive yet stoic, and there was a quiet fierceness in his eyes that told me he had seen too many hardships for someone so young. His back was arched in perfect posture and his head was held high, not out of a heightened sense of pride, but out of sheer will and resilience. When I saw his strength I felt broken.

We gave him two small bags of food before we left and told him that if he was here next week we would see about giving him a ticket to start receiving food from the ministry. He took the bags silently, with a quiet dignity, and began to walk away. I wondered where he was going, since he had never been here before and didn’t know where anything was. If I didn’t know his story, I never would have thought that he was an outsider. During his retreat he looked neither to the right nor the left; his head remained high and facing front. I followed him with my eyes until our truck pulled out of the village. As I observed him I couldn’t help thinking, “This is what poverty looks like. This is what poverty is.”

Emmanuel wasn’t dirty. He wasn’t wearing ragged clothes, and he didn’t have a distended belly. His appearance spoke nothing of his poverty, but his attitude spoke volumes. It’s an attitude that I can hardly explain, and that I don’t think you can truly begin to understand until you witness it for yourself. And even then, as outsiders I don’t think we can ever truly know how poverty affects someone.

People living in poverty are the strongest people I know. You have to be strong, or else life will break you. Nobody ever cries. On this island crying is for babies and weak people, and they hardly tolerate crying from babies either. If you have a problem you don’t cry about it, you deal with it because that’s all you can do. Their strength isn’t a choice; it’s the natural result of years of hardship.

People in poverty don’t look to the right or to the left for help, because they know they won’t find any. If they glance around the only thing they will see is more problems, so it’s just easier to face ahead and carry on to the best of their ability.

People in poverty seldom default to anger and indignation when things don’t go their way. Things rarely go their way. Many times in developed countries like the United States we get frustrated when things happen to us, like the electricity going out or a problem with our vehicle. We have grown to expect things to work out for us, so when they don’t we feel uncomfortable, or cheated somehow. Most people in impoverished conditions don’t learn to expect things to work out; they expect quite the opposite, if they even expect anything at all. That’s where the whole “live for the day” concept comes from in so many developing countries. Why bother saving money for tomorrow when I don’t know what tomorrow will bring me? Tomorrow could be worse than today. Better to use what I have now to take care of my immediate needs.

If Emmanuel was despairing over his situation, he wasn’t showing it. I’m sure he learned to suppress his emotions and hide his difficulties at a very young age. When we asked about him the next week they told us that he had left the same day he had arrived, setting off for the unknown. I will never see him again, and he will never know what an impact he made on my life. I hope and pray he found some friends to depend on.

So when you think of poverty, don’t focus too much on the lack of material wealth or the lower-quality living conditions. Those things don’t give you the whole story. Instead think of Emmanuel, his back straight despite all of the burdens he was carrying, his face determined despite all of the uncertainty before him.

That’s what poverty looks like.

That’s what poverty is.

Getting Wrapped Up in It

I’m sitting in my new living room in my new house in my new community, and after six days of living in Batey 7 it feels both natural and strange at the same time. This is hands-down the most extreme change I have ever made in my life, and I can feel it in my deep raw emotions and by how completely overwhelmed I sometimes feel.

Anyone who knows me pretty well knows that I am a definite introvert. I need some time to myself on a regular basis to keep me sane and ready to give my best to the people around me. I could be alone for days and feel perfectly comfortable, even energized.

At least, that was me before I moved to the Dominican. Over a year of having the Dominican culture beaten into me (it was much more pleasant than it sounds) has changed me in many ways, one of them being how little alone time I now need. Don’t get me wrong, I still treasure those afternoons where I can pop in a movie and eat popcorn with me, myself, and I. But I had grown accustomed to having my parents in the next room over, or the neighbor kids interrupting for a half an hour during the show.

But now here I find myself surrounded by strangers in a different culture, and suddenly I have never felt so alone in my life. Yes, my friends and family are just a half an hour away, but around here it really is just me and God, getting ready to do…what? In reality I don’t know what my next move is, and the planner in me is screaming for some concrete direction. Deep down I think I know that in this slow-paced batey community, direction for me isn’t coming.

I always want to share with you bits of wisdom that I gain from my experiences, and it took less than 24 hours to receive my first bit of wisdom from living on my own as a missionary. I’m going to be completely candid with all of you: my first night alone in Batey 7 was rough. Very, very rough. Thinking back on my life, the last time I felt that alone was probably my first night in Honduras when I started my internship for college. But at least I had some familiar comforts there, like my host missionary “parents” who understood the adjustment of entering a new culture. That situation was very similar to my situation now-I had just gotten back from a trip to the DR, and after seeing all my friends there, it was hard to plop myself into a country where I knew no one. For shy people like me (believe it or not), it’s hard to begin in new places.

Anyway, back to my first night. I tossed and turned all night, thinking of nothing but myself and how sad I was to leave everything familiar. I felt almost like I was suffocating in all my loneliness. My morning began quite the same, a lonely pity-party for myself. I had quickly become very tightly wrapped up in my own problems.

Wrapped up in my problems.

I stopped and considered that phrase in a way I never had before. I pictured my problems like a big piece of cling wrap, or like a dark sheet. The more I focused on my problems the tighter the sheet wrapped around me. It covered my legs so I could not move, and it covered my mouth so I could not breathe. Finally it covered my eyes so that I couldn’t see anything or anyone around me. Suddenly my suffocating feeling made perfect sense. I was smothering myself with my heartache.

Maybe all of this sounds very dramatic, and it probably is. But emotions aren’t rational, and they’re also nothing to be ashamed of. Let me tell you my first step in unwrapping myself from my problems.

My parents offered to take me to fill up my propane tank for the stove. We thought the gas station was close by, but it turned into about a 45-minute trip there and back. We passed some towns I had never been to before, and we passed other bateyes that I visit every week. I looked at the endless sugar cane fields that I have passed hundreds of times, and I realized that they were now considered my neighborhood. We passed so many people and so many houses, and for the first time since moving to Batey 7 I felt like I could breathe again. I cast away my own problems for the moment and focused my eyes on the life that was happening around me. I allowed myself to feel how small I am. I am one little person, in one little house, in one little village, in one little country, on one little island. I was so busy putting the weight of the world on my shoulders that I forgot that I was never meant to carry it. I’m not supposed to carry the weight of the Dominican Republic, or even the weight of Batey 7. I’m just supposed to breathe, and to take the next step that God lays out in front of me.

I was sharing with a friend about my concerns before the move. What am I supposed to do when I get there? What if this is a mistake? What if I fail, even though I don’t even know what it is I’m supposed to succeed or fail in? On the night before the big day, she sent some words of encouragement. At the end of her message she wrote, “You may not do something great in the batey but you are going to be something great” (emphasis mine). I think those words were exactly what God wanted me to hear. Why was I so concerned about doing something? The quick answer is because I am American and have been trained to measure my worth through quantifiable productivity. We want results, and we want them fast. According to this thought process, if I leave this batey and it looks basically the same as when I came, then I have failed.

But that’s not a good way to live. That’s not a way to live at all. I would kill myself with the irrational pressure. During my first few days in the batey I reminded myself of my insignificance. Don’t misunderstand me; my life has incredible value because I am a child of God, just as every life has incredible value. But I am just one feeble human with human strength. If God wants to use me during this time in my life to help transform this batey then he will do it. But if he simply wants me to learn to live life with no plan and to have complete dependence on him, then that’s great too. Whatever he wants to accomplish during this time, whether in me or through me, he will do it, because I choose to be obedient.

I still have moments where I feel weighted with adjusting to a new lifestyle and doing it alone, but in those moments instead of getting wrapped up in my problems I instead choose to open my Bible or send a message to a friend. And God has been faithful in sending people to be blessings in my life, like my neighbor boy who shared the fried plantains I made on my first night and who even had the decency to say they were good. Or the man who just showed up while my dad was fixing up the electricity in my house and helped him finish it without expecting anything in return. Or the woman next door who made lunch and dinner for me today (probably because she saw me eating popcorn for dinner two times already). It’s the little things that get me through the times when I feel alone. These difficulties won’t go away overnight. Maybe they won’t go away at all. But if I can look past my front door and remember the people around me who have their difficulties too, my burdens will become lighter as we share our burdens with each other.

I don’t do this nearly enough, but I would like to share with you some things to pray about. Prayer is an amazing gift, and would love to share the privilege of praying about these things together:

1.      Pray that I continue to adjust to my new community.

2.      Pray that I find friends my age to share my time with.

3.      Pray for the community of Batey 7, that they would feel God’s love every day and be open to his word.

4.      Pray for the church and community leaders, that they be given the wisdom to lead Batey 7 in a positive direction that is pleasing to God.

5.      And pray for The Least of These Ministries, that we always seek to serve God to the best of our ability.

I’m looking forward to keeping everyone updated! Thanks for being a part of this adventure with me. 

Do You Think There Were Flies at the Last Supper?

Anyone who has ever worked for a ministry or a church knows just how easy it is to get off track from God's original vision for that organization. Doing the will of God is an uphill battle, and since basically everything in this world is fighting against your efforts (like Satan, unbelievers, the brokenness of this world) it really doesn't take much for ministries to start losing their effectiveness, or worse, begin to do some harm. In my opinion, the biggest threat to a healthy ministry is human shortcomings.

You all know how it goes. You're sitting in your favorite pew at church (third from the front on the left side) and you're staring up at the preacher, but instead of listening to his sermon you're thinking, How can that man be up there teaching God's word after what he did? Maybe he treated a member of the congregation disrespectfully. Maybe someone asked him to come to the hospital to visit their mother and he never showed up. Maybe it was something worse, something everyone knows but nobody will talk about. No matter what happened, the result is the same: because of the pastor's human failing, his testimony is no longer as effective to the people listening to him, and the people listening to him start to judge him instead of paying attention to what God may be trying to say through him.

I'm not trying to condemn one person or another, whether it's the pastor or the people in the congregation. I just wanted to describe what happens when humans participate in the work of God: in short, we screw it up.

There are two issues going on in the story above, and today I want to focus on one more than the other. The first issue is the fact that the pastor did something that was wrong, something that hurt his ministry. Obviously we can't expect this guy to be perfect; he is human, after all. Our history is littered with stories of our massive screw-ups, and it truly is only by the grace of God that we have made it this far. With that in mind we need to be constantly aware of our actions to make sure that they are always pleasing to God. We need to protect our testimony fiercely so that situations like the one above don't happen. Part of that means having the humility to admit when we are wrong and having the courage to ask for forgiveness from God and from those we hurt. We can't prevent every mistake but we can allow God to bring healing to the situation if we allow him.

But the person I really want to talk about today is the other person, the person in the congregation looking at Pastor Screw-Up at the front and wondering why he is still allowed to be in the pulpit. First of all let me qualify and say that there are some things people do that should cause their removal from a church or ministry, serious offenses such as child molestation, for example. The situation should be handled with grace and compassion for all parties involved, but the whole forgive and forget mentality simply does not work for every situation. So as I continue keep in mind that I'm not talking about those types of incidents.

As a young girl of fifteen, freshly called to the mission field, I envisioned scenes of happy children dancing and playing, and joyful missionaries working together for God's good. I don't want to say that the next eight years of my life beat the pulp out of those dreams because that sounds too bitter and jaded; what I will say is that the next eight years of my life were a rude awakening. Missionaries don't always work well together, and they especially don't always work well with the nationals in their host country. Children don't always dance around you with joy; sometimes they throw rocks at you and call you horrible names. And ministry and church leaders don't always make the best decisions or act in a Godly manner. Where two or three are gathered to do the work of God, there will be problems. 

God can do amazing things through these people gathered in his name, don't get me wrong. I have seen the good with the bad, and I can tell you that God is doing incredible work through us humans no matter how hard we try to mess it up. And he can do even more things through us when we work together in unity. But many times those shortcomings and failures become distractions to us, and all we see are the bad things that are happening instead of the work God is doing.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a communion service. The hot climate and the church without screens sent an open invitation to all the nearby flies to come in and swarm the communion bread and wine as the pastor did his communion spiel. I have to admit that during my more human moments I was watching the flies buzz around instead of listening to what the pastor was saying. Were the flies more interesting than the sermon? Not really, but they were a distraction. That got me thinking about the actual Last Supper that Jesus spent with his disciples. It was hot there too, and I'm sure all the food attracted some flies, don't you think? When we talk about Bible stories we always seem to picture some gilded version of what actually happened. Like Jonah and the big fish? We almost never take the time to consider what the inside of that fish actually felt and smelled like. I bet at the Last Supper some of the disciples probably smelled bad. I bet some of their beards were too scruffy, and I bet there were flies swarming the food as they ate. 

Then I asked myself, What would I have been doing if I were one of the disciples? Knowing my attention span there is a good possibility that I could have been looking at the flies sometimes instead of listening to what Jesus was saying to me. That sounds ridiculous, right? But how many times do we stop paying attention to Jesus today when he is trying to speak to us? You might argue that it would be different if Jesus were in the flesh talking to you face to face, but after hearing about how thick-headed the disciples were during their time with Jesus I can't imagine I would be any different.

Here's the point I'm trying to make: focusing on people's flaws instead of focusing on God's Spirit inside them is like looking at the flies during the Last Supper instead of listening to Jesus. 

Behind the flies was God in flesh, sharing his wisdom and love with us humans. To focus on the flies was useless. And behind the nasty human nature we so easily see, there is God working through someone to share his wisdom and love. To focus on their failures is useless. It is a distraction from the good that God is actually doing. And we should diligently guard ourselves against all distractions. Yes, when we look at Christian leaders, we should readily see God through them. But here's the real question: when we look at our Christian leaders are we trying to see God through them? Or are we just looking for the next thing to gossip about and to judge? What do you think would happen if we decided to look past the people in front of us and instead tried to look at how God is using them?

Maybe it would be easier to think of it a different way. When people look at you, do you want them to see how you are messing up, or how God is working in you? This is easier for some people than for others. Thankfully I was blessed with sins that have become socially acceptable in our world (please note the sarcasm). Things like my judgmental, pessimistic nature, or the gossip that I so enjoy sharing. And also, luckily for me, my deeper sins, the ones I try not to expose, are sins that are very easily hidden. Having grown up in a Christian home and surrounded by a Christian community, I learned at a very young age which sins were acceptable to display and which sins I should keep to myself. But still, there is no foolproof way to protect yourself from exposure, and sometimes those sins come bubbling to the surface. Is that what I want people to focus on when they look at me?

And here's another thing. How can I look at myself  as a Godly young woman who is truly serving God (I really do think that!), knowing how much sin is in my heart, but I can't give the same courtesy to the guy next to me who is just as Godly and just as sinful? Here's the conclusion I have come to. What we see in people is very much a choice. We can look at the crap in their lives that attracts flies, or we can look at what God sees, a perfectly created person who is worthy of love and a lot of grace. Maybe if everyone who is a part of a ministry or church looked at their brothers and sisters like that, our ministries would look entirely different.

So let's give it a shot! Let's look for God in every person we meet, and see if our outlooks don't change.