It’s walking through Walmart that I know I haven’t forgot. That I am petrified I might.
It’s walking past the aisle of towels and dishcloths and tablecloths, looking for those girls of ours who had gone looking for leotards, for those scratchy things you need when the weather turns colder and the flip flops are flung in exchange for a proper pair of mary janes. I had told them two pairs, navy.
I had already picked up the family photo we’d needed printed for a family gathering, printing out the only group photograph we’ve taken in the last year, all four boys dreading pasty smiles and standing still and I’m a sorry offense to their barrage of begging off pleas. After I had prized photo in hand, I’d thought I’d take a short cut across the homewares department, through the bath mats and oven mitts, to the girl’s department.
It was the yellow and white plaid dishcloths, stacked and folded, like sheaves of thick papers.
I had stopped. The last time I had been here…
How long had it been? Could it really be that long? Why does time keep drifting us further away from the singular bobbing buoys, life markers, and there is nothing to hold on to, nothing to wrench ourselves back?
We had bought 4 of those yellow dishtowels for Xiomara’s mother. The Farmer had bought four for me. Over three thousand kilometers apart, we both wash plates with the same dishcloth. I reach out and touch the dishcloths. Run my hand across the weave.
It’s the girls who come find me. Find me standing in the towel aisle at Walmart, hand on a stack of dishcloths like I’m making a vow on a King James Bible. One tear slips, carves something out of me.
“Mom?” Hope had whispered it. Shalom had patted my leg. “Mom? Why are you sad?”
I could only choke it out, a barely murmur, each word coming hard. “I… miss … Xiomara.”
I miss the fresh bruising of my heart and I miss the witnessing, the ways the eyes feel when they are seeing for real, and I miss children and volunteers and love and I miss the way her smile curved and opened the lid right off the world. Like we were changing the world.
I miss being so close to help I could hold out my hand.
Shalom quietly strokes mine. Hope fingers the edge of a dishcloth.
How can your heart fuse with a child’s in the course of only thirty minutes? Her eyes. How can you walk around your house feeling like you are missing someone you don’t even know?
How can you keep scratching down words about leaves and thanksgiving meals and pretty plates when there are kids who are starving in a dump today, when there are kids who don’t have plates, never mind candles or flowers or potatoes?How do you keep peeling the scales off your eyes?What aisle stocks that answer?
I’m half-hearted brave through the check-out. We buy two pair of leotards. I have no idea if we should. The girls do need them. It’s October. This is Canada. But thirty one days ago I saw kids who had no shoes, living in a dump in Guatemala. Do we really need leotards? Do I really need a new dress, a sweater for travelling to Relevant next week? Do I really need a haircut? Mascara? Every time I open my wallet, I twist, conflicted.
I remember turning at the door, as I left Xiomara’s home, how the light fell on the the letters, the little I was leaving behind.
I can still see her. How I didn’t want to turn my back, walk away.
My last night in Guatemala, Shaun who had guided us through Guatemala with Compassion, had said it across the table to us, and this is what I remember, the Gordian Knot I can’t quite figure out how to slice: “The world, your community.. even your family — they are going to try to push you back to the middle. North America feels pretty comfortable in the middle. Balance, everyone says. I don’t know what Jesus is going to say to you.. How He might direct your life now… just don’t assume He wants you to live in the middle. Be open to the possibility …. Of something radically different.”
He’d looked around the table at us. I had kept looking up, a futile attempt to keep everything from spilling. “Don’t do anything drastic in the first month. Just pray and keep praying. And then after the first month… “
And my first month… it’s up.
I’m at day thirty one… thirty two… thirty three.
Am I just balancing quite nicely in the middle of my North American teeter totter? I feel a bit sick.
I said it was life-changing. What about my life has changed?
Yes. In the last thirty one days, we decline all 8 of us attending events, the ticket prices too high for a family our size. I stay home and read books to littles. I print out the poster Beth sent of my “This is the Way, Walk in It” socks. I wear the socks. I pray. Beg to hear some direction. I mount photos of the Compassion children in the kitchen. But how is any of this really keeping solidarity with the poor?
Yes. After banging away on the ivories exasperated on a Monday morning, Malakai figures out how much we pay each month for piano lessons. He comes to me while I am chopping vegetables. “Do you think it’s fair, Mom, that we spend all that just to learn how to play the piano? Xiomara and kids in Guatemala don’t even have shoes… So I was thinking, Mom…”
I look up from my onion. I think I know where he’s going with this…
“Don’t you think I should give up my piano lessons? To help?” He’s grinning far too wide. I may appreciate his philanthropy, but what can I really say to that? Why our kids? Why us, with piano and time and resources? Are music lessons really a right? Do I really want to give up anything? My mite?
Kai does go to piano lessons next week. His question keeps playing in my mind.
Playing in my mind when someone takes me out for dinner on a riverboat at dusk. I look up at stars. And think of stars over Xiomara, the dump. I’ve lost my appetite. What am I doing here?When one day I’ll stand before Jesus…
Keeps playing in my mind every time I sit down to this keyboard. Never before have I struggled so to pluck out words in this place. What songs can you compose when there is weeping in the world?
This inner turmoil, questioning, wrestling — how do I process all that here, publicly? How do I pretend I’m not? And what if I struggle — and still settle for the status quo? What if your heart sadly heals? How do you keep your heart wounded, alive and bleeding?
I have fumbled mightily in this places through these thirty one days. I don’t know what to do, what to write. Who I am.
And yes. I did give testimony before the congregation on Compassion Sunday. I ask you to pray and you, with overwhelming generosity do. I wear my shirt. I bring photos of Guatemala. I bring 15 child packs, dreams in need of sponsors. I bring 3 boxes of cookies. I say I have enough for the whole congregation. I give three boys in the front row the 3 boxes. They are now three smiling boys.
I ask the congregation if they are happy? They stare blankly. But, I say, there ARE enough cookies for everyone. The boys at the front just have to share. They just have to distribute the cookies. And if they don’t share? Well… I guess the rest of us go hungry? Two of the three smiling boys in the front row squirm a bit awkward.
One, the one with both arms wrapped tight around his box of cookies, he just keeps giggling. To his defense, I’m not at all certain that he knows what the word “distribute” means.
I look around the sanctuary, make eye contact with Bill Menkveld and Cindy Hayden and Dave Duccomon, and I tell slow them on Compassion Sunday what someone told me after I returned from Guatemala and I had felt it’s sharp edge along the skin, “God gives the world enough of what it needs. He just doesn’t distribute it.”
We will have to share.
We’re the ones who will have to do the distributing.
The boys come to me after the service with their still sealed boxes of cookies. They’ve come a bit sheepish, hands shoved out with their sweet wealth, returning the objects of the object lesson. I think one has come under only slight duress. I look into each one of their faces. I smile and say only this: “Just go share.”
Yes, this over the last 31, the first month, — but is any of this anything more than the Pharisee’s excess? I am terrified that now I have seen — I am responsible, and my response is pitiful.What in the world does it take to be radical?Give me that aisle!
I had written in my thank you card to Shaun on the way back to the airport, on our way back to our plush lives, “I pray I fight the middle to my last breath.”
I am breathing too easy at Day 32. Fighting too little.
The Farmer and the boys meet us girls at the van. Hope has the bag with the leotards. I am holding a copy of the photo. Same shot we left with Xiomara. Shalom explains to the Farmer, “Mom’s sad because she’s missing Xiomara.”
And I nod and the Farmer nods and I am sad for all of us in the middle of the teeter totter, not willing to jump, sad for how frogs die in water that seems just middling to warm and how they never notice that the heat’s slowly killing them.
We drive home. That evening, in the dark, all the children sleeping under stars, I wash the dishes. The water is lukewarm.
I wash off plates with my yellow and white plaid dishcloth.
The rotting flesh, the burning rubber, the foul festering and decay. I’m a farmer’s daughter, a farmer’s wife, and this is what I know: I’ve fed hogs and I’ve extracted stillborn piglets from the uterus of sows in a gush of fetid fluids, and I’ve hauled manure. And I know the fetor of death exhaling from bloated green bellies and the way bones reek with the blackened remnants. I know this stench I’m inhaling, that’s seeping into my pores. I step over a skull. A rat? A dog?
The bones of God?
Children run ahead of me. They have no shoes. They run along the earthen gutter in their bare feet and barren hopes. This is their street, their home, on the trash of the Guatemala City dump, the refuse people, the garbage families. It should be oxymoronic these terms, impossible. Incompatible. Why am I not screaming mad here?
Why am I walking sedate, passing blithely through, as if all of this was normal, acceptable — and not a splaying horror, a gross injustice to humanity, to souls? Aren’t these the Imago Dei? Aren’t these persons made in the image of a holy God, icons of the Divine? Wake up, God, wake up!
I want to cup their faces, look into their eyes. What are you doing here? You were not made for this. I am no better and I don’t know why I wasn’t born here, why my children weren’t born here and we all could have been. We all could have been.
Child, we are next door neighbours, you and I, and I am next to you, and there are no miles between who I am and who you are and you are my mirror, a manifestation of my soul and all my righteousness is far filthier than your rags and I can feel it in my gut — the haunting ache of my own poverty of spirit — echoing, echoing.
I am a canyon in a dump and there is this interior falling away, this falling in shock, this deadening, hollow shock… an inner gaping. Groping. Gasping. A soundless wild scream.
I do put another foot in front of the other.
A woman stands in the door of red spray painted 189. It’s more like a branding seared into her skin, her tin, than an actual house number, all this more like livestock penning than the burbs.
She wraps a strand of her black hair, frayed and nested, around her finger. She doesn’t take her eyes off me. I try to tell myself that I am not a spectator, that she is not the show. I can’t feel the thin walls of me. Only this numbness, this inner shocked paralysis that just keeps moving, fleeing. Squatters, these mothers, these fathers, these children, they recycle, sort, scavenge. Plastics. Cardboards. Metals. Dreams.
I walk past a decapitated doll head, muddied and grey, lying in the gutter. I heave to breathe. The air’s decomposing.Where exactly is God? I want His house number.
We’re told we can get a better view of the dump from the cemetery. Who could could have imagined a script this sinister? They take us to the tombs.
There are flowers here. The veneration of the dead up on an escarpment, rows of monuments and mausoleums and memorials, streets and stop signs and crowds of people with bouquets, hearses and funerary weeping women and a “Te Vender” — a for sale sign — on a tomb and moss over engraved names . There’s an ice cream cart with it’s bell ringing — that’s the only reason I turn — its vendor winding alongside the weeping women. Tink, tink, tink. I can’t imagine. I can hardly breathe.
Vultures keep circling. I can see them overhead. Black shadows soaring. Waiting. Wide wheeling over the cemetery, then out over the dump, over the barefooted children, back round over the graves. Full circle.
At the precipice we see the lines of trucks, the garbage coming endlessly. No hydraulics here. Every piece of rotting mass has to be muscled out of every truck by a man. A mother.
Two girls smile toothless for a photo. I stand witnessing. Barely breathing. The air hangs, thrumming with the wings of a thousand vultures, landing, diving, ripping.
Their oily black bodies drop onto limbs of a tree aflame in orange blooms. I witness this. This flaming, fragrant tree hanging from the cemetery out over the dump, branches reaching out to the scavenging humped figures. Vultures nestled with blooms. I ask the translator the name of the blooming tree. No one knows. The trucks keep backing up.
We pass the ice cream vendor on the way out of the cemetery. Hear his ringing.
At the center, at the Compassion program centered out of a church,we serve lunch to the children of the dump. They line up with their own plastic bowl and cup. Do I imagine where have they scavenged these? Lisa-Jo spoons rice. Lindsey heaps on beans and meat. Amanda offers tortillas. I ladle lemonade. There are lemon pits swirling.
I fill each cup to the rim for children living on the rim. I fill a cup that looks like the basin for a small blender. I swallow hard. I fill a cup that is a white cowboy boot with a spur. My heart can feel it’s forcing sharpness. Get moving God! Do Something!Move your people! Wake up! Wake up! Come riding!
I hand the white boot back to the little boy. I smile and he smiles. A sliver of light cracks the canyon.
Isn’t each face only Jesus in disguise?
A man, his wife, they lay a ticket stub on counter. We find styrofoam cups, two disposable bowls. We pray. We eat. Children laugh. I must seem worn, taut. I’m asked if I have a head ache. I can only thump my chest. Whisper raspy. “A heart ache.” I bang my chest again with the palm of my had. I can feel it all splintering.
I do ask about the ticket stubs, the man and the woman.
The couple live in the dump. They were given the tickets to come eat with us, share their story. We meet them after lunch in the church sanctuary. She never stops wringing her hands nervous. Their two daughters hold hands. The son keeps his eyes on the floor. I glimpse a smile now and then. The father speaks quiet. He tells us he goes to church services every other night. I shift my feet. Someone is awake — has been awake all along. I ask through the translator if he fears for his safety. He says no. God is with them. I nod, chin trembling.
We ask them about dreams, do they have dreams for their children?
What are your dreams for your children when you live in a dump? What are your prayers? What is your hope in all this decaying mess? What is His house number? Is the tomb really empty?
I can’t imagine this either, how he’s going to answer. He’s a father living on a garbage heap.
His black eyes circle all of ours.
“It doesn’t matter to us what our children grow up to become or do.” His voice is gentle, certain. I lean forward, praying he will still dream. Please, still pray.Even if…
And he does and the most important of all and I didn’t see it coming.
“All that matters is that they follow the Lord, that they live only for the Lord.”
Where did all this flooding light come from?
My chin wobbles hard and I let’s go. It doesn’t matter what garbage heap you live on, we all recycle only this, this the only dream prayer of all the filthy ragged ones on this circling globe.
Follow. Live only for.
I raise my hands and smile when we pray and there is a fragrant tree blooming beauty over our stench, a tree with nails driven right through that let’s the vultures land and brazenly blooms on, and I know where all this Light comes from. It’s when I say Amen and we raise our heads that I remember. And I can see it again.
It was laying on the earth up at the very end of the cemetery, right at the precipice where the dead gave way to the living dead and I had stepped over it like the skull and the doll head. And I had turned.
I had knelt.
I had touched it.
A wreath.
Like a crown of thorns.
Like Love sacrificed on the garbage heap of Golgotha, the place of the skull, remnant of He Who witnesses the ache of the pit and never leaves, a wreath circling out around all the living, that holds us all, a preserver, crown of all that will assuredly conquer.
God dwells in shadows and in pits, and in the skin of all who seek and reach, brazenly bold to those with eyes to see.
And when I see the family later clapping hands in games and filling the church halls with laughter, like bells ringing happy in the land of the dead, I see Christ and believe it again anew, a wonder! The tomb is empty.
Oh the fragrance in this place…
:::
Seeing Christ in the midst of the mess – footage from our trip to the dump & the Compassion Center:
Next Week:Consider sharing in community: The Spiritual Practice of Seeing Over the next three weeks, let’s prayerfully consider what it means to have eyes the truly see … We look forward to your creative voice, ideas, thoughts!
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All along the far side of the field, the pods tangle, hang waiting in the gilded and the swollen and the tractor keeps pressing alongside for the filling, the combine reel spinning, a ferris wheel rising and falling, sweeping pods up and in, splitting open each dry shell for a string of white pearled beans and a celebration of harvest.
Out here, in fields and dirt, out here in crop and harvest, out here with the kids and the Farmer and the brother-in-law, I meander, tangled, waiting for filling, sorrow swollen and stretching hard to get off this spinning, rising, falling world.
When I wash dishes in warm water, at a sink, something howls inside an emptiness, a wind moaning through a canyon. The walls of me quake. I tell my sister I don’t know why the shower makes me cry. Why this weeping grief? Sin? My greed? My guilt?
A gust rattles bean pods.
Love.
Maybe I weep for love. Maybe this is right and good, the sacrifices of God a broken heart. The combine keeps splitting pods.
And September runs steady and certain with it, a current singing, a stream of beans, filling bins and wagons and bins, and I begin to feel it, the hollows of our souls filling full with the sun made pearls, with the wonder of treasure hidden in a field, kingdom of heaven found in the giving, and I am willing.
The Farmer wears his “Just Smile” shirt and I wear my “This is the Way, Walk in It” socks and in the passing in the field, we smile a knowing at each other, us the broken beggars stretching out and willing, willing to buy the field with the one fine eternal pearl, to fill our hands any way we can with the kingdom of heaven.
The fields are gold this evening.
Gilded in light and heaviness, the harvest ready, and there are workers, there will be workers, we are all the workers, filling the bins with yield.
I don’t know really how to come back to this space.
What to write about, what to say, what doesn’t sound flippant, indifferent… negligent.
When our Compassion team debriefed on our last night in Guatemala, each of us were asked to share the one image we would take home, share one word picture that encapsulated our experience. I couldn’t speak. I had no words. Just this weight in my chest, all busted up. What I felt just kept trickling down my cheeks. I kept staring up at the ceiling, the light, trying to keep everything from spilling down.
Shaun asked me before we all left the table, “Are you sure, Ann? Anything at all? Say…. something?”
I could only shake my head. No parting the lips, lest everything leak away. Just keep everything sealed, hold on to it all, so nothing leaks away, so no one can get in to all that’s happening on the inside. No. No words. Nothing to say.
What is there to say?
I whispered it through tears to a Compassion team member as we flew home, “I feel like in giving voice to those who have no voice —- I have lost my voice.”
How do I return to my quiet, humble stories — when the world has desperate, urgent stories to tell?
Telling my stories now seems — wrong.
I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel so —- hushed.
I come home to the farmhouse, to the fields, to this family. I open the mail. I find a pair of socks. Two pairs of socks. Pink. Striped. Soft. From Elizabeth.
Elizabeth has knit me socks. Prayer socks. One prayer per stitch. Nine thousand six hundred stitches per sock — plus the heel and toe. So nine thousand six hundred prayers per sock — plus the heel and toe. Four socks — forty thousand prayers.
It is my first day home from shanties and dumps and squatter towns. I slip on Elizabeth’s socks. I remember laughter. I remember smiles. I remember the holding on and the silky black hair.
I open emails. I find letters from families who have made the decision to change the world and sponsor one more child through Compassion. I smile, brim. Heroes! Co-labourers with God, making miracles! Wonder!
I read words from missionaries living out Christ in lonely shacks around the world. Notes from homeschooling mamas who have started orphanages several continents away. Of parents who have adopted from Ethiopia and Guatemala and China and who have made their hearts big and lives humble, of women who serve in food banks, of fathers who plant churches in poor communities, of families who begin letter-writing ministries. I pray, moved. I give thanks, marvel. I see people fixing the world in Christ, right where they are, however they are, doing something to reach in a million ways all around the world.
I cheer! Saints! All!
I read words of women overwhelmed with a sense of hopelessness, a sickening sense of what in the world can I even do, a reality of having little to give and feeling the need so great. I nod, understanding. Quieted.
How do we do this?
I get a letter from Maynor, one of the boys in the Leadership Development Program. I am in happiest wonder. I read that he is sad, discouraged, clinging to hope in God.
I curl my striped feet up under me, write a letter back. I tell him people read his story at (in)courage and more than a hundred children were sponsored because hearts on the other side of the screen wanted children to grow up to be like him.
His response blinks back on the screen:
“I am glad to know because I am encouraged to continue making a difference in my country and thus be able to give GLORY TO GOD, MY FATHER BEAUTIFUL …!!!”
I am warmed right through, from striped toes to heart. I can’t stop smiling, blinking it all back.
I think this is the thing: We do something to make a difference — in our country, in our world, in any way we can, — for even the smallest can be made large by God — all for the glory of God.
I think of Elizabeth and five children and stage three cancer and knitting prayer socks. Doing something. Even from a bed.
I walk through the day and I think of impoverished children on dirt floors and rats that scurry over feet and the fermented bottle always to the lips draining all the life away.
And I remember light in their eyes and the smiles that tugged and when I close my eyes— I can hear the laughter of Guatemala, the laughter of the children that danced to the love of God experienced anywhere, everywhere.
I can always hear their laughter, church halls ringing with their laughter.
And listening to happy memories reverberating off inner walls cracked, I realize I don’t need a voice, I don’t need to know what to say, what to do. Maybe that isn’t the first step for any of us. Maybe something else comes first. I wiggle my toes in socks.
Maybe before doing, before speaking — maybe we first need to listen — fervently, faithfully listen.
Listen, so that “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”
God will be the voice that draws near, that whispers right into the ear, warm and close, “This Child, this is the work I have for you in the world, to change the world, to love this one heart, and this one heart, and this one heart. Do this and do it with a love. For this is your work that will ripple out into eternity.”
Listen — and then do.
I have loved until it aches, and found that the love consumes the ache, so there is only love — much more love.
I have lost my voice — and I have found His. “This is the way; walk in it.”
I am going to be okay; it’s all going to be okay and I remember why all is well. “For the Author has written Himself into the Story and now walks with us until the Story is finished in His time, in His Way, for His Honor and His glory. All is well.”(~Peretti)
I have twenty thousand prayers on the feet and I walk out into a whole new and broken way of being and living and giving. Walk out into a world that is hurting and can only be healed by His stripes.
I wear love and I listen and speak fewer words and I walk. I walk.
Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” ~Isa. 30:21
Next Week:Consider sharing in community: The Spiritual Practice of Seeing Over the next three weeks, let’s prayerfully consider what it means to have eyes the truly see … We look forward to your creative voice, ideas, thoughts!
Today, if you’d like to share about How You Care for the Least of These...just quietly slip in the direct URL to your exact post….. If you join us, might we humbly ask that you please help us find one another other by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.
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