Our last day of Ministry in Trujillo, Peru took my team to
the dump. The dump is the reason that Inca Link, our host this month, exists.
We have worked in various ministries this month designed to get children out of
the dump.
The site of the dump was about as sad as you can imagine.
Trash as far as you can see. Smell as bad as you can imagine. Barefoot children
eating rotten fruit that they found in the piles. Fires sporadically burning
and smoke billowing throughout the area. They also set explosives in the piles to
help keep fires burning, so there is an occasional thunder of explosion. The
people of the dump community live in this atmosphere every day, there to sift
through the mounds of garbage for food and sellable items. It is their home,
their business, their way of life.
To make this experience as painful to bear as possible, the
walk through the dump is about a mile, so it is a seemingly endless barrage of
sadness. And the closest thing to the dump is the massive prison that we went
to a couple weeks ago.
As heartbreaking as this scene is, this is the reason I came
on the World Race. To be light in the darkness. To change the world for the
better. To love the least of these. Sometimes, the intersection of practical
help and those intentions are hard to find, or maybe just not easy to see
through the smoke and the smell.
As I was walking through the dump, trying to think of all
the practical things I could try to do to put a dent in healing this situation,
God asked me to just pray. Just pray?! No thanks. I want to see these walls
torn down, today. I want to have an answer. I want to be a solution.
Sometimes I forget how important and powerful prayer is. It
doesn’t look like a solution. It often feels like a cop out, an excuse to get
away with not doing anything. A crutch for me to feel better without
contributing genuinely to change. But prayer is what we are created for. Prayer
is communion with the Father. Acknowledging, worshipping, thanking Him for
being the God of all persons and all situations, all circumstances, and all
scenes. To pray is to bring something to the heart of God, to lay it at His feet.
To ask for Him to be a solution, to recognize Him as The Answer. Prayer is the
most powerful thing any human is capable of.
After countless steps of tragedy, we finally got to our
ministry site at the dump, a humble little house of wood that Inca Link has
built there. We walked in to the Presence of the Lord, a couple dozen children
singing, dancing, smiling, and laughing as they followed their teacher in
worship. It was a pocket of light in the darkness. The Presence of God refusing
to leave this place, these people, alone. God is there. Using children, dirty
and smelly, overworked and undernourished, the weak things of the world, to
shame the strong. His love is present there.
Walking back from the dump was maybe even more heartbreaking
than the walk in. Because I was thinking about how the scene at home is also
tragic. Apathy and complacency are the most dangerous of conditions. Our
overuse is actually more spiritually deadly than the scene at the dump. God
wants to reconcile hearts to Him. His vision for the world does not include a
Starbucks at every corner.
We are not on the Race to feed hungry people or to
heal the wounded and sick. We are here to worship. We are here to just pray.
And trust that from the overflow of our praise, lives might be changed, both
physically and spiritually.
And so, for both the people of Peru and the people back
home, God has asked me to pray. Just pray. Pray that He would encompass us all.
Pray that He be the Light in the darkness, both the darkness of smoke-covered
dumps and overpopulated malls. Pray that they would pray. Pray that you would
pray. That we might be defined, not as strangers on different ends of the
comfort spectrum and separated by thousands of miles, but as siblings adoring
the same Father, united in hope and in love, neighbors in the Kingdom of
Heaven.
