so, i wrote at length in the previous post about the physical conditions, save for the diet which i’ll save for the end to lighten the tone. i suppose having been to mexico, peru, and honduras before the race had pre-conditioned me to the poverty and living conditions i anticipated facing in central america. and if even if i didn’t have that set of experiences in my background, the last nine months of the race have been a meaty precursor in and of itself.
it happens all the time: we enter a place and everyone notices that we’re different. we’re from “the west” which is synonymous with “wealth”. even though we came to immerse ourselves in communities and lifestyles all over the world, boundaries still had to be established. in the philippines, the border was the gate to YMC where we ate and slept. in china, those boundaries would stretch right to the front of our hotel room door. in kenya it was kids with hand stretched out who greeted us with a “how-are-you?-i-am-fine-give-me-10-shillings”. in uganda, friends i made asked me to find sponsors or give them my ipod.
i guess one of the lowlights of the race is that you find yourself between a rock and a hard place more often than you’d like. you’re there to bring kingdom and with such force! you are filled with the Holy Spirit and you are an extension of Jesus. you pray and God answers. it’s awesome.
but you’re out here, simply, having recklessly abandoned everything. while you’re not literally empty-handed, there’s very little you do have for the year. although you want to give the scores of children and families you meet what they ask for, you can’t always, and sometimes you shouldn’t. getting this glimpse of the Father’s heart is hard; you understand a little better that what they want isn’t what’s best for them – and even then, i wonder, how do i know that? it seems almost patronizing for a well-to-do north american to tell someone “no”.
then you go back to your team to eat pb&j sandwiches and instant noodles and drink bottled water and later on climb inside your tent to sleep and tune the world out for a few hours. “i didn’t come out on the world race to say no to the poor; i wanted to give a resounding yes!” i think. God said whatever i do or don’t do to the least of these, i do unto them. so i wonder, “what am i doing or not doing?” or maybe you do say yes. but then they come to you again, for something that seems less than necessary, and you get the sense that your first yes was interpreted as an unlimited access pass to an amusement park. all of a sudden you feel like hindsight was 20/20 and your yes looks more like the key that unlocked pandora’s box.
yup, it’s month 10 of the race. you think you’ve figured it out by then, but you havent. but that’s something you can actually count on on the race, ta-da! Jesus, let us do what You did – feed them spiritually and physically; make us richer in Spirit and multiply what little bread and fish we have.
speaking of fish, there’s a tilapia farm out here. we bought some for our dinner last night with the family of six we’ve been serving. as gross as it was to scale and gut them, they were deliciously worth the work. we also bought two live chickens; i got to witness the whole production process – alive, clucking and still plumed to being in pieces in a pot of soup. what was unexpected was that i didn’t vomit as the mother asked me to grab chicken feet and pour water as she dismembered and gutted our poultry.
you know what else i didn’t expect? that twelve of us – team lunchbox minus kyla and a family of six – would leave leftovers from a dinner of ten fish and (two whole) chicken noodle soup and tortilla. perhaps i overlooked the miracle of multiplication – and seating said twelve around a small square plastic table – that was right in front of my face.
