Reconciliation

Lately I've wondered a lot about what my role is here. I continue to learn, learn, learn every day, but so much of this experience seems about how I am growing, and not what I am offering. This is not that surprising, given that in such a short trip it's difficult to imagine a significant impact on anyone's life besides my own.

One thing is clear - in order to best be a servant and disciple of Jesus among the poor, my attitude must always be one of humility and dying to myself in order that others may live. I feel helpless to offer any suggestions or programs or ideas that can help in the barrios, much less even do something. So often my idea of Christian service revolves around help in a material way, such as helping to provide food or assisting someone with a physical ailment, or working to improve housing situations.

However, while all of those are needs here, they are actually often met by the government. As I've mentioned before, Venezuela as a country actually has quite a lot of money, and because it's socialist, there are many programs to provide for people's physical and material needs. Each neighborhood has a government-sponsored casa comunal and a consejo comunal, basically a house and council that exist to serve the community. They even offer things like aerobics classes! Food is easily obtained if you are poor, and many of the homes where are neighbors live sprung up when the president told people "Here is some land. If you don't have a place to live, you can make one here."

What emerges to me now as something us gringos who follow Jesus can offer is to be ministers of reconciliation. Basically all of the violence here springs from acts of revenge. In the neighborhood where we are doing the kids club, there is a long history of violence. Shamefully for us, it started when Air Jordans arrived in Caracas and someone was killed for his shoes. That began a run of violence that has literally died down - it is restlessly quieter because most of the people involved in the violence have died. In the kids club we have an opportunity to model and teach the power of love and forgiveness. This is a foreign concept to many of the people we meet. Just yesterday someone on the team was talking with a man on the street. Our teammate asked him about what might happen if someone were to ask forgiveness for something, and the man said, "no, no. They might say sorry, but never ask for forgiveness. No." Our teammate kept pressing, but the man could not imagine such a thing ever happening. Yet, if a spirit of forgiveness were to invade the hearts of the neighbors, it's mind boggling to think of how things could change. This generation would have hope, instead of fear.

Discerning the way to transmit this message of hope and forgiveness is our challenge.