While still at training camp, the 16 students were assigned to 2 separate tables for meal time (due to the fact that they were simply too big for one table). For the first day or two they sat at their two little tables in two little groups. The communal food was always in short passing distance. They had all kinds of space and personal room, but they were physically divided. They asked us why they had to sit separate from the others. They really didn’t like the fact that they were divided and couldn’t talk to everyone at once. So, by day two’s supper, they moved the two tables together and made one big table with 16 chairs crammed around it. They were now elbow to elbow and knee to knee, but they were one. Uncomfortable, but one.
While in Kenya, we were able to visit and do ministry in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum. It is just over one square mile in area, and is home to just shy of one million people. Just being there was almost more than a person could process in any short time frame. Overwhelming might be a good word for it. For a while, Traday (my co-leader) and I stood at the edge of a small bluff overlooking Kibera, and just watched. The government was building a series of large, modern apartment buildings on the outer edges of Kibera
and offering them to the residents for only 200 extra shillings (equivalent to $2.50) per month than what they were paying in the slum. But they weren’t taking it. They were declining the offer to upgrade from a 1 ten-foot-square room, no plumbing, no electric, no door shack made of corrugated tin and mud bricks to a 2 bedroom apartment with the works and even a locking door for only $2.50 more a month. Why? Traday and I pondered this question for some time.
We finally asked one of our Kenyan friends and translators and they told us that they just didn’t mind their poverty enough to leave their friends and neighbors they’d lived with their whole life. Wow. Just like the kids at training camp, they ultimately chose community over comfort and even security. When I am at home, I will choose YouTube over community. How ridiculous is that? We are comfortably separate and they are uncomfortably one. We trade community for comfort and they trade comfort for community. Which do you think is more beautiful in God’s sight?
I’ve been learning lately that community is an essential element in Christianity. He wants us to be one as he and his father are one. Although not completely, locks and couches seem to hinder our desire for and participation in community. If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. If your lock causes you to sin, tear it out. And if your couch causes you to sin, throw it out and get patio furniture. Just saying.
