The Pink (and Blue) Elephants in the Room

The Pink (and Blue) Elephants in the Room

Because of Child Sponsorship, I didn't have a prayer.

I took a group of women to Tijuana last week, my first trip there in 2 years.  My last visit was also with Women of Vision, and some of the same women were on this trip. 

In the morning, we visited several energetic microfinance borrowers at their businesses.  It was a whirlwind display of practical and creative enterprises, all of these run by women: a convenience store, a beauty shop, a produce stand, even a pet food shop and an internet cafe.  The latter business owner was clearly a serial entrepreneur.  With each subsequent loan, she has addressed one more customer need and business opportunity after another in her "cyber cafe"...moving from telephone access to computer access, to arcade games for the bored children of computer users, to a snack counter, refrigerated drinks, even a still-rare indoor toilet for customers.

These were fun visits, learning about the impact of the loans, seeing once again the confidence that running a business builds in these women, most of them single mothers.

But our host Bárbara was wise in scheduling those visits prior to our stop at the Las Palmas Community Center.  Because once we arrived at Las Palmas, all love broke loose. 

Most of the visitors in the group are sponsoring children now in Tijuana—something which has only become possible in the past couple of years.  The staff and community volunteers had arranged for virtually every one of our group’s children to meet us at the community center.  A couple of these children had met their sponsors two years ago, and you'd have thought a favorite aunt had just arrived for a visit.  There were hugs, squeals (especially from the women in our group), and laps to be sat upon.

We tried to organize our usual program overview, and each person around our large circle introduced themselves.  But each time a sponsored child was introduced, or a sponsor mentioned the name of their child, another connection was made and everything stopped for new hugs and more exclamations of glee.  

A little side drama was happening for my wife Janet and me.  In a shadowed corner sat little Jose Antonio with his mother, his head buried into her chest.  He's our sponsored child, a replacement for another "Jose" who moved away last year.  We chose this little guy because his photo looked so forlorn, and we wondered if he was mentally disabled.  In fact, he has just been diagnosed with some learning disability—probably autism or Asperger’s Syndrome.  He kept his head down but his eyes piercing straight ahead, never smiling, and at times headbutting his mom's chest.  She was embarrassed, and I'm sure that whatever small disappointment we felt in comparing the reaction of the other sponsored children against the reaction of our Jose Antonio was magnified many times over in her heart.

As the introductions continued amidst the growing din, Bárbara tried valiantly to keep the process going, but it was as though she was trying singlehandedly to hold back a dam.  It was a powerful reminder to me, a guy who earned quite honestly the moniker "Agenda Trenda", that connection trumps information.

You see, there was an elephant of love in the room that day, and even when we tried to focus on other topics, such as the important work being done in economic development, sanitation, delinquency prevention, health... that elephant kept getting in the way and demanding the attention of everyone's heart—even those who didn't have a sponsored child.

And it was beautiful to behold.  Though geographically Sponsor and Child live less than two hours apart, socially and economically they are practically on different continents.  Yet the bond of relationship was so strong and tangible that it was the most important reality in the room.

I've always had a strong desire for these one-day trips across the border to be a window that gives visitors a clear understanding of WV's global methodology. It's rather amazing really, that in just a few hours, a person can have a cross-cultural Vision Trip experience, and they can come back much better educated on just how sound our program model is and how its underlying principals operate anywhere in the world.  I've thought with satisfaction many times of the day when a pastor told me, "Traveling with you Cory is like getting a graduate-level course in Christian Community Development."

So when I was younger and more agenda-driven, I'd have been frustrated that so little of this wonderful, important knowledge was imparted last week. But instead, great love was imparted. An entire crowded roomful of love was on display, in the staff and community volunteers, as well as in the children and their sponsors.

And in the final analysis, the most intelligent, logical, world-class program is nothing without love. 1 Cor 13 makes it clear that only that which is deeply and truly rooted in love will make any difference at all.  At least on this trip, I saw that Love had a better idea of what could be accomplished than I did, and I didn’t fight it.

I've recently realized that a primary motivation for my writing is that I want readers to experience the love I've come to feel for the poor, and to realize that really, we are all the same.  Or, in the beautiful words of Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, which provides economic opportunities for inner-city youth and gang members in LA, "It's not us versus them; there is only us."

So, was my "agenda" achieved?  More to the point, I think God's was.  It’s not knowledge versus love.  In the end, there is only love.

Cory

May 2012

The Difference A Century Makes

Last evening, Janet and I watched an episode of the Ken Burns' documentary Baseball which focused on Babe Ruth and the singular, unparalleled impact he has had on the game. One small factoid really jumped out at me: George Ruth (his given name) was born into a poor family in Baltimore in 1895, the oldest of nine children. Of the family’s subsequent eight children, seven did not survive infancy. How amazing and even miraculous that George lived to become arguably the greatest baseball player ever.

Today I was reading a World Vision annual update regarding our For Every Child initiative.  The report included the story of Rose Mukarukundo, a Rwandan woman and single mother who fled that nation’s tragic genocide in 1994 and then married.  Buried in the middle of the story was the sentence, "Four of her five children died as infants, and eventually Rose's husband abandoned her."

How similar those stories are, separated mainly by geography and one century.  There was one other point of separation: my focus, which had shifted from the surviving child to the unspeakable heartache of a mother who has lost nearly every child she bore.  Parenthetically, in our country it has become popular to say “No parent should have to bury their child” which—while true and empathetic—also speaks to our expectations of zero child mortality, a reflection of the incredible change in our reality over the past century.

Another part of this same report focused on malaria, the #1 child killer in much of Africa.  Malaria.  It seems so intractable and so pervasive in these countries, but completely absurd when imagined as a fearsome killer in America.  Yet, until roughly 100 years ago, malaria was a major scourge in the Western hemisphere too, including the U.S., particularly the southern states.

Totally "unfixable" in Africa*, yet long ago totally "fixed" in America.

What a difference 100 years makes.

And yet, how many of us can tolerate such a long view and be faithful to do what we can do now in order to achieve results that simply will not be accomplished in our own lifetime?  We have this vague sense that this would be poor stewardship, because we won't "be there" to witness the final declaration of victory... that on the day of my death God will somehow hold me accountable to the final result of my efforts or prayers or donations, so I’d better stick to problems that will be "dead" before I am.

As I've noted previously, when I started in this work 30 years ago, over 45,000 children were estimated to be dying every day of preventable causes. Today that number has been reduced by half.  Taken over the long view, the progress is stunning.  At the same time, it’s impossible to truly comprehend the vast numbers of children who still died needlessly each day over this same 30 years.  The glass is both half full and half empty.  But it's certainly not stagnant, even if the change appears so sluggish and arduous that many people throw their hands up with impatience that "nothing is changing."  Some days the same thoughts creep into my head, days when my shoulders and chin sag and a sigh escapes involuntarily.

At times like that I'm comforted with a beautiful prayer-poem usually attributed to Salvadoran Bishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980 while celebrating Mass in a cancer hospital in San Salvador...

It helps now and then to step back and take a long view; the Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.

No prayer fully expresses our faith.

No confession brings perfection.

No pastoral visit brings wholeness.

No program accomplishes the church’s mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything,

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

Amen.

Rose's story of unimaginable grief as a mother is tragic.  Yet the fact that the equivalent tragedy occurred in Babe Ruth’s family only 100 years earlier gives me great hope for the future of places like Rwanda.  One hundred years from now, there will still be plenty of current social ills everywhere, crusaders aplenty for programs ministering mercy and justice appropriate to that era.

Yet the infant mortality rate in urban Baltimore today is but a tiny fraction of the 77% that George Ruth's mother endured.  One hundred years from now, may that be the case in Rwanda, and Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, and in all of God’s world.  Our offspring's offspring may not be ready then to declare that God's Kingdom has fully come, but may we then be in that great cloud of witnesses testifying that, compared to the way things were during our watch, God's will is being more fully done on earth, as it is in heaven.

Cory
May, 2012

* Actually, major progress is happening regarding malaria deaths, thanks to a major scale-up in malaria programs over the past decade in Africa.  A recent study, "estimates that 842,800 child deaths have been prevented across 43 malaria- endemic countries in Africa, compared to year 2000. The impact in 2010 is estimated to be biggest, with a 24.4% decrease in malaria- caused child deaths, compared to a scenario of no scale-up of prevention interventions beyond 2000 coverage levels."