The sight of a woman pushing her disabled husband in a wheelchair through the streets of Granada. The smile that refuses to leave her face even as she speaks of losing her home and sleeping on the sidewalk.
The smell of heap upon heap of trash at the dump.Human and animal waste alike. The image of a child no older than 5 digging through the trash mountain. A pile of salvageable items rests at a woman’s feet as she sits to take a break from digging. She picks up a baby doll, brushes back it’s hair, and tosses it to the muddy ground. Vultures fill the air as well as the open ground. Dogs fight and pillage the available scraps.
The darkness that comes when you’re on an island in the middle of a lake. The light that breaks it, streaming from just two light bulbs. The mountain of bricks to be moved. The feeling of your skin wanting to peel away from your body after carrying bag after bag of sand through hip deep water. The humility you’re dealt when you see a six-year-old carrying more than double what you can physically handle.
Poverty is a tricky thing in that it makes you feel all sorts of ways. Maybe you feel bad. Bad because you’ve just witnessed a child digging through mud and garbage in the hopes of finding something that their family can clean and sell for even a little money. Mad. Mad because you see kids treating each other like animals and treating animals like scum. Stressed. Stressed because in the middle of a mission trip, you are constantly surrounded by the phrase, “I feel so bad for them.”
What does that even mean. I’ve asked myself that a lot over the past week and a half. What does it mean for me to feel bad for someone? Does it mean that I hold my situation at home so much over theirs that I actually feel bad that they aren’t the same? Like I have it so much better, and there’s no way they could be happy if they don’t live like me.
Time after time, I’ve found myself being unable to compare my time here in Nica with anything I’ve dealt with back home. Because they aren’t the same.
For the longest time I believed that the Christian plight towards poverty was to immediately come up with a solution because someone’s life wasn’t like mine. Like my gifts of money would do more than my time. Like acknowledging poverty was more effective than entering into it.
James says:
“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
Feelings have a way of becoming crutches. We use them to excuse why we are, or aren’t, doing a specific thing. “I didn’t buy that guy a meal and sit with him, because I had a bad feeling about him.” “I didn’t give up that extra hour of my day to listen to the woman pushing her husband through the streets, because I felt worried that she was going to try to push me for money.” “I didn’t make eye contact with the homeless man on the corner because I didn’t feel like giving him anything. Even my time.”
I can tell someone all day everyday that I’ll pray for them. But imagine the look on their face when instead of offering a look of pity and a kind word, I sit down and decide to do that particular moment of life alongside them. I enter into the uncomfortableness. Without the agendas. Without the fear. Without all the feelings overpowering my call to live like Jesus lives. What if I sat down, didn’t let my feelings dictate, and washed feet?
“He got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him” (John 13:4-5, NIV).
