The summer between my 1st sophomore and 2nd sophomore year (yep that is how I define college) I had the opportunity to work at King’s Domain, a Christian sports camp). It was an amazing summer and one of the lessons I learned was to look for the spiritual analogies in the world around me.
I love doing this when I’m out hiking or in nature, but today all of our afternoon ministry activities were cancelled and so we spent a little over an hour prayer walking around the community where our dorms are located. The area is not unlike the rest of Bangalore. You have shops on the major streets, but if you get off the beaten path, you quickly run into shanties and people living in squalor. Not far from where we are staying we stumbled onto a lake where people were fishing and washing their clothes.
Clean clothes and finding food are always important in life (trust me I understand this more living here where I am hand washing my clothes after wearing them for days at a time). But, this was not a lake like you would see in the U.S. Instead, it is surrounded by garbage and you can see garbage floating in the water. I saw a fisherman who was literally standing on top of a pile of garbage to cast his line into the water.
From an American perspective, why in the world would anyone want to eat fish caught in that lake? I also watched a family do their laundry a short distance away? Who would think it was a good place to wash their clothes?
I am not throwing stones, as for the people of India, this is their option. Clean water is a precious commodity and especially hard to come by in the slums of the city. If they want fish, they need to get it out of that lake. If they want cleaner clothes, they need to be washed in that lake.
But I ponder how often my own life is like this when I have another option. I am guessing that the people using that lake don’t even notice the trash anymore. It is everywhere in India and so it isn’t actually surprising that a person would cease to notice it. Do I operate like this, unaware of the trash in my life and how it is having such an effect on the things that I am doing? Does it keep me from having the best because I am figuratively washing my clothes in dirty water? It gives me something to think about this evening as I prepare for another day tomorrow on the streets of Bangalore.
