A week ago i shared a piece from Sarah Bessey’s new book ‘Out of Sorts’ on Justice and Shalom and so i want to share the second part of that with you. This is from Chapter 11 which is titled ‘Beautiful Facade’ and subtitled ‘On Justice and Shalom’:
= = = = = = = = = =
When I start getting mad at the facade, I peek behind it and guess who I find?
The Church.
The people of God are already there, among the poor, serving the poor, loving the ones behind the beautiful colorful lies. They’ve just been waiting for the rest of us. I think there’s a way to be a critical thinker without having a critical spirit. I think there’s a way to help without hurting.
The comfort of the divine is this: Do not be afraid. Over the years, God has gracefully, wholly, generously, ferociously, broken the chains of fear in my life. And now I know that fear must always be cast out and that the only fix, the only key, is love. Love is greater than fear; love always wins.
I want to love the poor, and I also need to recognize my own poverty, my own complicity in systems of injustice. I don’t want to make caricatures or sob stories or manipulation or success stories out of another person. I would like to love. I would like to meet my neighbors, both next door and in the developing world, to know them. Justice isn’t for “over there”: it’s for here and now and all of us. And I’d like to learn, and I’d like to help, if I can, and I don’t know where else to start but right where I am, right now. The Spirit often calls us to repentance before we are called to our ideas of revolution.
= = =
I can be a bit cynical about people out to change the world now. For instance, when I was first invited to go to Haiti with an organization called Help One Now to be a “storyteller” years ago, I wanted to say no. Of course, there were practical reasons: it’s far away, inconvenient, and my children were very young. But I also wanted to say no because I have an aversion to the whole blogger/celebrity trip phenomenon in nonprofit circles. So when Chris, the leader of the Help One Now tribe, asked me to join him on a short trip to Haiti with a few other bloggers to “tell stories’, my first instinct was a simple no.
The western world, including churches, has a habit of showing up in developing countries with a lot of zeal and good intentions that can ultimately end up hurting or crippling complex societies, and then wounding precious people through inadvertent ignorance. I have learned by now that helping can hurt, and I didn’t want to hurt Haiti economically or relationally. I wasn’t interested in tidy, simple narratives for the purpose of raising money. I cringed at the thought of trotting Haitians out as props for fund raising. The phrase “poverty tourism” revolted me. It was easier and safer to do, well, nothing.
God is already at work in every corner of the world, in new and beautiful ways, and we have so much to learn from Haiti. God did not arrive in Haiti with the mission trippers and NGOs.
I believe that how we do a thing is as much a part of justice as the result of it all.
Yet I couldn’t seem to say no to going to Haiti.
Every time I tried to refuse, my no stuck in my throat. I wondered if this might be a nudge from the Holy Spirit, so I took a few steps back, and I got to know Chris and the rest of the team. I learned that they were centered on empowering and resourcing local leaders for the long haul, precisely because of their great love for God. They were focused on community development to combat the orphan crisis, instead of simple rescue aid or hugging orphans one week and then disappearing once the slide-show-pictures were done. Their intent was not to have feel-good “revivals” to fluff up statistics in church annual reports. Chris and his team deferred to Haitian leaders and purposefully kept all non-Haitians associated with the project in the background. They took the posture of students, listeners, fellow journeyers – not saviors. They didn’t shy away from the complexities of Haiti’s systemic injustices and the long road ahead. They were not perfect, but they were learning, because they were there to stay with Haiti.
So I said yes.
I went to Haiti. I’ve heard that souls grow by leaps and bounds. If this is true, then Haiti was a catapult for me. Chris and his team were not show-up-and-take-pictures Christians; they were we-are-with-you-always=especially-in-the-hard-parts Christians. They thought about the long-term consequences of their decisions; they thought about community development that was driven by relationships. The Kingdom of God is a seed, a grain of wheat; the Kingdom of God is a treasure in a field, it’s leaven in the bread, it’s a feast and a wedding and a party, it’s the forever way. There is no flash-in-the-pan performance with God’s ways. And the people of God are salt and light, a city on a hill. Kingdom of God people stay when everyone else leaves to the next sexy project or cause.
The people of God love, they push back the darkness together, they freely give honor and dignity. They make friends.
The people of God’s Kingdom come back. They learn before they teach, they listen, and they stay.
I’m learning to stay. I’m learning to listen.
= = =
The first time I went to Haiti, I met a man who moved a mountain. Literally.
After the earthquake hit Haiti, much of the already-shaky infrastructure was damaged or destroyed, particularly around the capital city, Port-au-Prince. One of the local leaders turned his home into an orphanage overnight: abandoned or orphaned children kept showing up at his house, and as he said, “What was there to do but let them in?” After the years had gone by, he began to realize that many of the children in their communities were vulnerable to child traffickers or the resaveki system in Haiti. Pastor Gaetan began to consider the simple solution of creating a school. In addition to educating children out of poverty and ignorance, he felt this would be a safe place for children while there parents worked during the day. He had enough space at his home to build a school in the yard, but the land was unusable. A steep hill of rock and solid Haitian yellow clay made building impossible. The hill was expensive too excavate owing to a lack of workers and equipment. As the word passed that Gaetan wanted to build a school but couldn’t because of the steep hill in the backyard, one sixty-year-old man showed up.
One man with a pickax and a shovel and a bucket. With only lunch for payment, he began to dismantle that mountain, stone by stone. In the blazing heat without benefit of shade, he single-handedly dismantled that entire mountain and smoothed the ground for a school to be built.
We told his story on our blogs, and then we raised the money to build the school. It’s been a few years since he gave his strength and energy, time and sweat to that rock demolition.
And today, there are approximately 250 children at that school. I returned a couple of years later, and I stood in the exact spot where that hillside had stood – except now I was standing in a classroom.
I now feel like I’ve been witness to the miracle, the miracle of the Church united across nations, the Church that shows up and loves well, the Church that stretched from my little home in Abbotsford all the way to Haiti – and then to homes across the world in Ireland, Australia, the United States and beyond.
The school was not simply aid, nor was it a handout or an invasion. No, this was a Haitian-led community development plan born out of friendship and relationship.
This school is one small thing, one small stone in that massive mountain of complex issues related to economics, social justice, community development, family, debt repayments, international policy, poverty, education, all of it.
I couldn’t move the whole mountain. But I could help move one stone, and I chose this small stone because Chris and his team of people who live there told me it was a good pick.
Sometimes, yes, we do speak to a mountain and it will lift up and be cast into the sea. But I’ve also learned over my lifetime that it is just as holy and just as ridiculous and just as miraculous for the people of God to pick up their own small shovels and get to work, a million small stones at a time.
I have decided that, rather than being someone who denies the existence of the mountain entirely – whatever that represents in the moment – or someone who simply gives up in despair, I will be a woman who picks up small stones and moves them. Small acts of faith and justice are still acts of faith and justice. I will be a woman who slowly and over time and alongside many others will make that mountain move.
Revolution doesn’t look like changing diapers or making meals, right? Kind people don’t change the world. We can’t imagine overturning the empire through these small stones that we lift up, one after another, through the small lives we minister to, through our words and our prayers.
But some of the most Christlike people I have known in my life, the ones who have changed the world, are doing it in ways that we often think are beneath us. I think we’re dazzled by social media platforms and conference stages, bullhorns and accolades, faraway locations and long plane rides. We take liberties with them, perhaps.
Jesus often spoke of the Kingdom of God in small ways: a seed that grows to a mighty oak, a bit of yeast that causes the whole loaf to rise. I have a preference for the grassroots folks, I admit. I see the ones far from the usual power and leadership narratives as the heroes.
And so I believe that we – as the people of god – are called to prophetically live out the Kingdom of God in our right-now lives. That means setting up our lives as an outpost for the Kingdom way of life, the life of a disciple, the life and life-more-abundant of our God’s dream for humanity.
The Kingdom is often taking root in small ways – in our kitchens and in our parish halls, in our streets and our subsidized daycares, in youth group mentoring relationships and after-school care, in prayer circles and bylaw meetings at city council.
= = =
Brett again: That story of the mountain moves me every time. When i read it the first time i was waiting for everyone else to show up. The old man starts digging and one by one the whole village starts to appear with their shovels and mountain moved. But it doesn’t go like that at all. One old man moves the entire hill, dig by dig.
There are a lot of those people scattered around South Africa giving me so much hope and challenging me to get out and start moving my stones [which i made the first move to do this week but want to try not blog about that so it can just be something i do] and maybe that is how this revolution will happen – one act of restitution at a time, one invitation or friendship request or meal or conversation or act of kindness. And then another. And another. Til suddenly the mountain is no more.
i do think it will take more than one old man doing it for South Africa though, but for each of us, perhaps this inspires us to be on the lookout for the stones that can be moved around us.
[For Part I of ‘Justice and Shalom’, click here]
= = = = = = = = = =
Leave a Reply