Savin' the World

Why did I choose to come to Mexico? For ten weeks? When I had never been out of the country or on a mission trip before? Because I'm a little bit weird. You see, I started studying poverty towards the end of high school, and since then I have read many books and watched many documentaries. I have pieced together the web of poverty strand by strand. I have analyzed different approaches to poverty alleviation and researched organizations like World Vision. And I have always sworn that I will never be one of the kids who likes a picture of a poor kid on Facebook and considers themselves an activist. I would actually do something about it. Surely I was God's answer to the world's problems. Why had poverty not been solved yet? Because I was still in school, duh! I just needed a few years; it was all under control. I just needed to get to the poor people I read about it in books. Then I would save the world.

Last Tuesday we held VBS in a community here. A young, physically disabled woman came. Her foot was so contorted she limped badly. It appeared to me to be a clubfoot. I had seen pictures, but never met anyone in real life with such an awful injury. And I realized that it could have been easily fixed with surgery when she was a young child. 

That night we returned to Camp Vergel, where I had met Alejandro the night before. This time instead of giving caballitos to the kids, I accompanied one of the long-term missionaries to visit a lady. The lady spoke English; she had grown up in North Carolina and been deported last year. So I sat in a room (probably 15 ft by 12 ft or so) where this lady lives with her husband and two nephews. She offered us Coke, and we drank some. She didn't have anything else. It is my prayer that I become a person who will share until I have nothing left. We chatted with her about life, and she told us that she was working on getting a high school certificate. She only has an elementary certificate now. That reminded me of the film "Girl Rising" I watched a few months ago that talks about how important educating girls is in order to fight poverty.

After we returned to the film ministry, I was giving a piggy back ride to Alejandro when I noticed a little boy standing alone, shivering and barefoot with his arms tucked in his short sleeve tee shirt. And he was coughing so hard. I asked him if he was cold, and he said yes. So I talked with him for a while and ended up pulling him close, trying to warm him up. He coughed and coughed, and my mind started spinning. Could I get him a sweatshirt? No, because that wouldn't be fair to the other kids. Medicine? I didn't have any. And to take him to a doctor would require finding his parents, getting permission, and I still couldn't because that wouldn't be repeatable every time we find a coughing child. So I held him, cried, and prayed. Then I left. And he was still cold. And he was still sick.

It hurts not being able to help. The only thing I thought was keeping me from helping "the poor people" was distance. Now I see them face-to-face and am still powerless. The answer to the world's problems? I can't even provide warmth for one little boy. But maybe I'm not supposed to save the world. Maybe that's Jesus' job. This world is so broken--to try to fix it is in vain. Instead all we can do is hold the world as it dies, cradle it gently and whisper hope of a life to come in its ears. And I will continue to hug the cold out of a coughing little boy until God shows me something more to do. In the meantime, He'll save the world. He has to.