Signs of Hope in The Lemonade

In Guatemala City we took our students to the largest slum of Central America, called La Limonada (literally, The Lemonade), sitting at the feet of two of the most amazing urban leaders in the city, Tita Evertsz and Pastor Erwin Shorty Luna.

Tita has 15 years experience serving La Limonada through specialized children's programs before and after school. She literally had to escort us into the slum due to its level of danger. The respect the community has for her was our protection. We descended down into a ravine via a path leading around slum shacks cobbled together by rusting corrugated tin, rotten wood and concrete, to one of two schools she has built. The ravine flowed with a river of garbage and sewage, but it could not overwhelm the river of hope that flows in this notorious slum.

Just the week prior Tita had received a death threat from gang members who wanted protection money. Yet even the threat served the kingdom because some young gang members she had been loving and serving, upon seeing how shaken Tita was, dropped to their knees in prayer for her, indignant that someone should threaten her. God allowed them to see the impact of such threats on someone they loved -- significant because some of them had demanded protection money of others. I know this is an overused phrase, but she is truly the Mother Teresa of Guatemala.

Shorty is one of Joel’s gang chaplains, who grew up a street kid on the streets of Guatemala City and then was a major gang member in L.A. A powerfully built man with a quick smile, he is now working hand in hand with Tita doing some church planting work in the heart of La Limonada. He is a mature Christian who flows with a deep knowledge of Scripture and a spirit of joy.

The whole community loves Shorty and Tita as they have built relationships through Tita’s schools, and Shorty’s fearless mentoring of violent youth.

Then we visited a shack where a severely retarded 16 year old girl lived like a hermit on a rotting mattress in a corner of a dark room. The shack was perched over the ravine. Her mother was overwhelmed, as well as trapped by an abusive husband, who was sexually abusing the three daughters. I felt like throwing him out the window into the ravine, but thankfully Tita is pursuing a wiser approach. During that visit we were able to get the ball rolling to get the girl to a care facility run by an associate. A God-ordained coincidence — a Dios-idence according to Tita — meant the colleague was just a five minute walk from the shack when we called him. He was able to join us right away and get the story. Tita began to ramp up her relationship with the Mom and look for a way out for her and the girls, which are few, given the abject poverty.

Shorty and Tita are signs of hope that the world needs to know about.

We also spent an afternoon and evening in the city of Peronia where a controversial pastor has garnered a peace accord between the two rival gangs in his community. He spent the entire day with us. We met former rival gang members that are now friends. Crime in the whole district has dropped a reported 74%. More hope.

The Scriptures say, "There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God." (Ps 46:5). La Limonada (literally, The Lemonade -- leaves a sour taste) is becoming a city of God. Others see shacks wrapped in misery. Tita and Shorty said they feel that unless you can learn to see joy and beauty in the midst of pain sand suffering you will never last in this call of God. I needed to hear that and see it demonstrated. I see hope and fragrance of sweet lemonade.

Boxes of Bones

You may not want to read this. I promise happier thoughts in the future. But my privilege requires it.

Entering into another country’s open wound – mass murder and genocide – is like standing next to the surgeon as they probe a cancer. It feels personal, and a privilege, though I never met any of the victims. Yet I have heard from their children and grandchildren, have seen their tears, and strangest of all, have touched their very bones. They are stacked in clear bags and cardboard boxes at the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, as they are matched through meticulous DNA testing with the some 50,000 people who were “disappeared” during the Armed Conflict. This is a crucial project for the healing of the nation, not to mention the individual peace of thousands of families. And it is a chance to ask about the role of the church in this healing, about the church’s silence at key points, about the ways the sins of the past reach into the present daily life of Guatemalans. The blood still cries out from the ground.

I’m not sure what to write about this, so can I process my junk for a minute? What relevance could this strange privilege of mine – to glimpse a national agony not my own -- have to my friends? I don’t know the answer to that question; perhaps you can tell me. At least bear with me. At the next table tonight, an American youth group from Michigan is here on a mission project. They are serving Guatemalan kids. Their youth pastor announced to me that Jesus really didn’t call people to end poverty. They are just here to save the street kids of Guatemala City. But I wondered what he would say to the relatives of the victims, or to the custodians of the bones. Did not Zaccheus’ repentance mean justice for those whom he had oppressed in his city? The Youth Pastor’s gospel drives him to acts of compassion, but cannot lead him to imagine, let alone pay the price needed for there to be transformation of evil systems. His message of love, delivered to the grandchildren of the murdered, will be appreciated by them, but does he realize the children on the street are there precisely because generation of Grandfathers was violently removed from their role as provider and model? Did their pain and the agonized cry of the children left to fend for themselves not echo in God’s ears, break God’s heart? As Ray Bakke reminds, did not a political decision by Herod mean that hundreds of kids died for Jesus before he had a chance to die for them? Does the heart of Jesus not long to transform the systems that keep pumping out modern day Herods in every generation? And because our CIA funded the Herods of that generation, do I not bear some responsibility to speak for these bones? Sorry, impolite questions.

I saw it lying on the table at the forensic lab, though I could almost feel as if it saw me. It was the latest skull to be unearthed, found among the murdered. It was slightly larger than my fist. Children have always suffered worst for the sins of adults.

As I passed through rooms stacked to the ceiling with sealed and tagged boxes – the remains of identified victims – my fatigue began to grow. As I listened to our guide, I absent-mindedly leaned against a stack of them, as if a wall. A pillar of bones, some with the unique signatures left by machetes on limbs or gunshots to heads. Thousands of tibia, fibula, clavicles, hip bones, no longer privileged to support their original owners, they now supported me – helped stand me up straight for a little longer. The least I can do is stand up for them. The least I can do is to train leaders to ask the impolite question, imagine a future without need for a place like this, and organize their lives around that quest.

Something Larger than Myself

Standing by the General Grant Tree in Kings Canyon National Park it is easy to feel small -- something that rarely happens to me. I tend to be the tallest thing around, unless my sons are also in the room. The fact that this Giant Sequoia has stood silently since the time of Christ, towering above its companion Lodgepole Pines and Western Red Cedars impresses smallness on everything in its shadow. I love that feeling. I sat, immersed in it, sketching the lower portion and its fire-scar because I was taken by its swirling red and amber texture. But there is no way to sketch the hugeness, the feeling of weight, the dominance, and the soaring height. There is no sketchbook tall enough, no journal with enough pages to explore the contrasts between us.

If there are few living things that can make me feel puny, there are plenty of circumstances that seem to have that power. My work is populated with things larger than myself, and every day the scouts send back reports of giants in the land. It's on days like that when I need go stand in the shadow of real giants. I need the reminder that some things which loom large are large only in my imagination. Being at the foot of something real blows these ghosts away. But there's something else that happens as well, as I crane my neck to take in the top and then let my eye extend past it. I worship the One who made the Sequoia, the One for whom that tallest, heaviest of living things is no more than a matchstick.

That's when smallness becomes a gift.

In praise of all that reaches high

Of all that towers tall

Which in their redness pierces sky

And dwarfs the false gods all

I praise the mind that dreamed of giants

And planted them for me

And pray that I remain compliant

Then join their company