I am so upset right now. Geoffrey asked me on the way home if this was going to be a "blog" and I told him no, I just wrote one the other day, it would be at least another month before I wrote another one. But now, two hours later, I am so upset that I feel like the only way to get it out of me is to "share it with the world".
People can live their whole lives with their eyes closed. They aren't ignorant of what goes on in the world around them. You know about the child trafficking, the female mutilation, the starvation, the brothels, the genocides, the street children, the abusive husband down the street, the girl who cuts herself, the drug addicted, the poverty that leads to disease and death. They know. They just choose not to let it affect them. They choose to close their eyes and only open them for the "important" things in life, themselves, or maybe the "easy" things in life, things that won't cause their materialistic smile to turn into a frown.
But the Lord tells us to bear one another's burdens. Bear them. I suppose we can choose to only bear the burdens of those we have to bear, our children, our parents, our spouses. But what about those who have burdens too painful to even mention. Burdens that can't even be imagined. Burdens that would drive someone to suicide. Those are the hard ones to carry. Those are the ones easy to close your eyes to, and pretend you can't do anything about them.
Today after church we went to bear a bit of Maria's burden. You all remember her. That is Henry's mom. Henry is the 22 year old boy, I say boy because that is all he is, with cerebral palsy who lays in a bed soiled in his own urine and feces all day long, every single day. His mother was raped 22 years ago and ever since has bore the burden of 24/7 care for her son, who now is too big for her to move. She struggles to even change the t-shirts she wraps around him as diapers. They are very poor and she does the best she can as a single mother with no income. People look at her and judge her. People whisper about her and talk about her behind her back. She has had no one to help her bear her burden, no one except a faithful God. She is a devoted Christian woman who has looked into my eyes time and time again with tears falling down her cheeks telling me in broken Spanish,"No aguanta." That means, "Doesn't support." She is telling me that she just feels at times like she can not do it anymore. It is too hard. Mentally, she can not do it. Physically, she can not do it. Emotionally, she can not do it. But yet, she does it. And now, living 45 minutes from her house, we are trying our best to be there for her. To help her "aguanta". We support them monthly with food and medicine. We sit and listen to her talk and laugh and cry for hours. I hold her hands and try to understand her plight and remind her that with God, she can. She is. I am here for her. I pray for her. I love her like a sister and will do what I can to help her bear a little of her burden. She is not perfect, she makes mistakes, but who am I to judge? Who am I to withhold the good I can do?
Today, we sit there and we listen. We talked about the hard rain from yesterday and she begins to tell us about some "poor poor people" that sleep in the dirt and the rain washed all the mud over them yesterday. I am looking around her dirt floor shack and thinking, "you are telling me about people you think are poor??" I ask her where they live and she immediately gets off the bed, grabs her shoes, and says let's go. We walk about 25ft from her shack to an even smaller shack. A shack smaller than most of your bathrooms. She says some things to the people inside that I don't understand and then motions for us to come in.
This is why I am upset. Meet Catarina (I wish I had a picture to insert here). Catarina, a 23 year old little girl, I say little girl because that is all she is, stands there and greets us. At her feet sits Victoria, a 1 year old, filthy little girl. She is sitting on a piece of torn plastic in the mud. She is digging at what looks like a dirty tortilla. She starts to cry when she sees our white faces. 3 ft away sits a young man and a 4 yr old little boy, also covered in mud from head to toe. Catarina was abandoned as a baby by her mother and never knew her. She now has this husband and two young children and I am standing in the middle of their house and they have nothing. Absolutely nothing. There are no clothes, not a toy in sight, no bed, no couch, no shoes, nothing at all. There is a tiny wooden stool and a little rotten wood table, not much bigger than the stool and a shard of a blanket not even big enough to cover the one year old. That is it.
I have seen poverty. I have seen extreme poverty. I have never seen anything like this. Catarina's eyes filled with tears as I asked her questions and I did everything I could to keep my eyes dry. I can't wrap my head around that family of four and how they live. I wanted to run out of there and pretend I never saw them. I told them "nice to meet them" and said we'd be visiting them again. Turns out Maria gave them that stool and little table. Maria brings the kids over to her shack to help clean them. She shares the little food she has with them too. Maria, who's paraplegic son lies in the bed 24/7 while she tries to keep the flies off him for fear of the maggots she will find crawling through his hair, she is trying to help this little family. She sees their need. She has a better excuse than anyone I know to close her eyes and not do anything, but she doesn't. The woman who has next to nothing doesn't close her eyes to the plight of the ones who have nothing, how can we?
The Lord knows He has opened my eyes. He knows if He puts it in my path, I have no option but to act. That is, after all, why I live in Guatemala in the first place. All the suffering things He brings us, we help. How can we say no? Are we not saying no to Jesus Himself? I have been through plenty in my life and could make plenty of excuses, but when your eyes are open, there is no excuse. If you have breath in your lungs, you have no excuse. Give until it hurts. Give of yourself without holding back, without making excuses, give and give and do it all in the strength that the Lord provides, because that strength will never run dry. If you don't have anyone's burdens to bear, then it's because your eyes are shut.
We will go back to Catarina this week and we will build her a bed. Yes, we have lots of work to do here, and it will cost us money, and she lives 45 minutes away from us, and we will be dirty and uncomfortable, but the Lord has put her in our path, or shall I say put us in her path, and to close our hearts to her is to close our hearts to Jesus. To get her and her babies out of the mud, to pick them up in the middle of their suffering, to reach out to her and to love on her and show her that we care for her, well, that is exactly what the Lord did to us on the day He passed by and saw us squirming about in our own blood and He said to us "Live!". As Ezekiel 16 clearly portrays, He held nothing back from us, not one thing. He lavished us and gave us His absolute everything.
Are my tears for the weight of the burden that this family of four, and so many others like them, has carried for too long? Or do they fall because of all the suffering in the world that could be relieved or even eliminated if only people would open their selfish eyes? Together, the body of Christ can always "aguanta", always.
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