Our ministry this month with Living Hope Church is going into the Ghetto (their word for it not mine) and hanging out with the ones who live there.
The goal is to show them a new perspective on what life could look like. It doesn’t have to consist of sex at 12, babies with your latest boyfriend, prostitution to make money, or drugs and alcohol to numb the mundaneness of life. How? How do you show that in a few hours a few days a week for shortly less than a month?
The first day we showed up I immediately took to one of the kids. Through a translator I learned he was four. And we played soccer.
Most of you who know me (or maybe read one of the blogs I wrote in El Salvador), know I’m not a sporty person. But Jesus meets people where they are. And while I can’t speak a language this kid understands with my voice, I can communicate with him.
We simply kicked the ball back and forth. Me in a long green dress and black ergonomic flip-flops, him in a blue shirt, black pants and orange striped socks.
He had a good grandmother. She made sure he was within her sight at all times and we played in an alley that was closed off to cars.
He liked to challenge himself and kick the ball hard and a few times it went over the fence. The first time I think he could tell I was devastated, because I could see no end to the wall nor entrance to the other side. He simply held up a hand that I took to mean “wait” and he scrambled up and over the wall with an agility that paralleled a monkey.
It wasn’t his first time doing it, nor would it be his last. The yard on the other side had been allowed to grow wild, it had trash bags and bottles strewn throughout, half hidden by large leaves and long blades of grass. But throughout the overgrowth long dandelions which had grown in peace for a while were full and perfect.
That, that is what we are doing. It’s not our job to point out or clean up the trash. It’s not our duty to come in with a weed-whacker and manicure the lawn. It’s not our mission to reform the world into uniformity.
But rather it’s our job to blow on dandelions. To see the seeds those before us planted and from that point encourage more seeds to fly and find more good ground to grow. To rejoice in greenery and love what God has been cultivating all along. To simply expose them yet again to the truth that God love and values them enough to send a team of people to their home just to spend time with them and kick a ball.
