Campo Kids (kind of graphic)

I go to a fairly middle-class church in Managua, so you don't normally see really impoverished people in the services. Sunday was an exception. One of the missionary familes had brought about eight kids to church with them. They were obviously from the campo, what Nicas call rural areas without very little development. I'va had some contact with kids and adults from these areas before, but not much. You remember the kid who slapped my butt on Miraflor? That was a campo kid.

They came in dirty and three of them sat in front of us. Two of them had their hands over their ears because it was so loud, and I laughed and smiled and put my hands over my ears, too. They smelled bad. They had dust and dirt all over their faces and knees and feet. They kept hitting each other. Hard.

A few rows in front of me there was another young girl of about twelve or thirteen. There was a toddler that she was looking after some of the time and that she would leave in the seat at other times to go sit somewhere else. She was wearing a shirt that was too big for her, cut low in the front, and had thin straps that reached down almost the entire length of her back. The young toddler, probably a sixteen month old girl, kept pulling down the front of the other girls shirt and putting her mouth on her breast in an attempt to find milk from this underdeveloped girl. She would let the girl do it, then swat her away with a loud thwack, and then let her do it again. When she had had enough, she put the child next to her where the child proceeeded to reach over and grab and poke at the same area, both of them kind of laughing as she did so. After a while the older picked up the younger and took her to the bathroom. When coming back, her shirt was down so low that it exposed the entire left side of her chest.

I went from wondering if this girl was her sister to questioning whether she could be her mother.

I'm used to poverty, but seeing the mindset of people in poverty was hard for me. It was easy for me to want to judge them and the people who brought them. How could they let this happen in a public place? How could these kids act this way to each other? Couldn't they have just taken a quick bath?

And then I realized that the love of Christ is trying to reach these kids, and I am convicted because that's not what was in my mind at all.

It's hard to balance out the desire for decency and modesty with the need to just love people. How do we react to this part of the subculture here, or even in the states? How do we respond to the mentally retarded homeless person who starts to talk to us, or the smelly person who shows up in our church, or the prostitutes that that we hear about or see? Is it our initial reaction to reject them, to talk about them, to be disgusted by their lives instead of full of pity and love for them?

I played a song by Sufjan Stevens for my apologetics class this morning. It's about John Wayne Macy, Jr., the serial rapist/killer of almost three dozen young men a few decades ago. He tells the story of this man, and the last verses say:

"And in my best behavior, I am just like him. Look beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hidden."

I think Lewis (and a number of other theologians) have it right when they say that pride is one of the worst traps you can fall into, because so many other sins bleed out from it. Pride is what somehow makes me think that I am better than those kids because I bathe or understand "decency." Pride is what makes me think that I have the right to unabashedly criticize other's actions instead of being moved and grieved by sin. Pride is a lot of what prevents me from loving people for real. Pride is what makes me think I'm okay because I don't do anything "really bad." And the breaking of pride is the only thing that makes me realize that I am a sinner like any other, and it's only through the grace of God that I can do or be anything. I have no right to feel superior to others, especially when those others had no say about their circumstances. To introduce a little imagination theology, I don't know what Jesus would be like if he were walking on the earth, but speculation leads me to believe that while he would visit our churches and talk with "good" Christians, he would spend a lot of time in conversation with those outcasts. And not the superficial listening or tolerating someone because it makes us feel good, but listening because He really cares and values who they are.

I'd like to be more like that.