The rain never stops in Buenaventura Colombia. Though the
water never stays on the ground for too long--the heat is always unbearable. 1 million people in a city that is hot, humid, wet, yet always in drought. The city is one of the more impoverished cities I had ever visited, garbage fills the streets, all the buildings made of gray cement, any other material would rot. The
streets are always alive; you would never guess there is no water. The music
that plays from each shanty house is almost deafening, and the laughter even
more so. Children kick soccer balls around, and people constantly dance salsa in
the street in the rain, avoiding the potholes as they go. I had never found myself in the
middle of a war of such juxtaposing realities as I did for those three months
while preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I was walking to meet with another family, when I heard a
voice from behind me say “Elders.” It wasn’t a loud voice nor was it said as if
to reach us, just to identify. I looked up from underneath my broken umbrella
to see who was behind us, and there was only a teenage “gamín” or gangster
leaning up against the wall with the brim of his hat covering his eyes. We
continued a few steps. Again, “Elders”, I looked behind and still it was just
the scraggly teenage boy. I turned around and asked him his name, he told me
his name was Brandon, and that he had once been a member of the church a long
time ago.
Brandon was skinny, you could see
his cheekbones protruding and his dirty shirt hung on him like a sheet. He had
just walked 600 miles. He had fled from Venezuela, the cartel was going to kill
him; he was alone. He had a tattoo of a star on his shoulder, his name on his
arm, and the word “Love” tattooed across his bottom lip and knuckles in English.
He was only 16. His tattered shoes and
dirty pants showed his life in the streets on the run for the past few weeks,
and he barely had the strength to talk or stand. At that moment I think I got just
a small glimpse of how God may see us all, small, struggling, weak, but yet
with the potential to be something better. I picked him up and carried him in my arms, we
told him we would find him a place to stay out of the pouring rain. He knew the
name of the neighborhood his family lived in but nothing else. So we did what
we do best, and we knocked on all the doors on the street looking for a similar
last name.
After about 15 minutes of knocking
when we asked for the Castaño Family, the woman behind the door said that we
were in the right place. She looked at the emaciated tattooed boy in my arms
with distaste, I could tell from her jean skirt she was an active member of a
church, I explained to her that the boy I was holding was her sister’s grandson
from Venezuela and that he needed a place to stay. She grudgingly opened the
door and took us into the back where she had an extra bed. She curtly informed
us that she couldn’t feed him but he could sleep on the bed. We told her that
would be all he needed, and that we would figure out the rest.
Every day we would go back to the
house. We would bring Brandon food and help him out of bed. It only took about
an hour of our time, plus the 5-minute check-ins we would do periodically
throughout the day. He spent most of the week asleep. Every time the woman
would open the door for us she looked at us with disgust, I could never tell
who she disliked more, her tattooed refugee relative, or the foreign
missionaries from another church than her own. Nobody seemed to want Brandon,
they looked at him, malnourished and tattooed, and judged him. He was so helpless I couldn’t
understand. Though, at the end of the week Brandon had gained a lot of his
strength back, the helpless quiet boy we had found in the street was no longer
struggling for words; rather they came with biting ease. He would make many
rude and crude comments towards his new family members, I was left speechless as
to how someone who had received so much could then turn around and be so ungrateful.
I doubted the feelings I had had when I first saw him, was there potential in
someone so broken?
As soon as Brandon could walk, his great-aunt
told us that he wasn’t welcome to stay in the house during the day. We were
left with no choice, so we began to bring him everywhere we went. Through the
rain, through the heat, we walked and walked and walked. His crude language
only got worse, and we were stuck in an interesting situation. We told him to
just stay quiet when we would teach but that didn’t exactly work.
The first day we went out with Brandon we went to the house
of a very old woman who had invited her 15 sons and daughters to hear us, all
of which had their own children and grandchildren back home, we were so excited
to share our message with them. We walked into her dimly lit cement home, sat
Brandon down in the corner behind us and stood up to talk to everyone in the
room. There was little space so we had to be careful not to step on everyone’s
feet around us. It had just become dusk, so the mosquitos were fairly
bothersome, and Brandon having been under a blanket for the past week wasn’t
used to the exposure yet. Right as we were ending our discussion on Christ we
heard a sharp slap from behind us as Brandon slapped at a mosquito and yelled
“SHIT, you have way too many mosquitos in this damn city!”. The entire room
burst into laughter. The city, a place of boisterous laughter and music,
reverence was hard to come by, any spiritual setting or reverence that we had
created had completely vanished.
We took him to church that Sunday.
We walked into the chapel with this teenage boy by our sides, us in white, him
in his yellow-green tank top and worn-out shoes. People stared at the tattoos
on his knuckles, his shoulder, his arms, his lip, especially his lip. Mothers
guided their children at a safe distance. I was surprised to see the reaction,
it was the same reaction I had been seeing all week towards Brandon, but in
that moment it was different. These people, who professed a love for Christ and
a lifelong goal of discipleship, refused to even try to see past the ink on
his skin. They looked at him as if the ink passed deeper than just the skin,
that his blotted soul could rub off on them. At that moment I didn’t know what
to do. I felt his pain as he looked around at those that he thought might have
at least treated him as an equal, it made me think, did I ever see him as an
equal?
When we had found
Brandon, had I viewed him more as a thing to be helped, a project to be
accomplished? Why did I want to help Brandon? Was I more drawn to his
helplessness and the possibility of serving other than caring for someone as my
equal? I felt sick to my stomach as I realized my error. I had viewed Brandon
more as a service project, it was my duty to help others, but for the first
time, I saw why I had been so willing to help. It wasn’t for my brotherly love
for someone equal to myself, rather it was just to do the service itself. I had
been more focused on reaching down to pull Brandon up than to wrap my arm around
him and walk forward with him. Christ never looked at himself as someone better
than us, rather he experienced the pain of all so that he could walk with us
through trials not just urge us along from a pedestal above. That is what it
means to love, to walk with others, and try to experience and understand their
pain and suffering as their equal and not as a superior.
I immediately stood up walked over to where Brandon was
standing against the wall, put my arm around him, and began to introduce everyone
to my brother.
Weeks passed, and I bought Brandon some new clothes, he had only
been wearing what we had found him in. His cheeks had started to fill out and
his pants began to stay on a little better. Soon the crude humor, the bad
jokes, the bad language, it all started to dissipate. We finally thought it
would be a good idea to have Brandon do something when we had a discussion with
someone about Christ. We taught Brandon how to pray. At first, he told us he
would never pray, but at the end of the day, he agreed to try. I will always remember that first prayer he said. We all knelt down in a small room with a
couple and their newly born baby and Brandon began to pray, his tattooed lips
sharing words with God. At first, I couldn’t stop looking at his lips, he seemed
to struggle with the words, his tattooed name on his forearm was taut from him clenching
his hands together. The words were so simple and genuine. He told us afterward
his feelings when he prayed, mentioning the peace and calm that washed over him. He was soon frequently asking permission from those we visited to say the prayer.
As I watched him say prayer after prayer, day after day, I saw his eyes
clear and his posture straighten just a little more.
It was a Sunday about two months
after we had found him, Brandon came to church but he was not alone. He brought
his cousins, and was wearing a white shirt and tie. I didn’t buy him the shirt.
I watched him walk his cousins in and usher them to a pew bench near the
middle. The other members of the church came and sat down with them, welcoming
them to church. He took out a hymn book, his shirt and hair still wet from the
rain outside. He showed his cousins how to follow the verses with the music
notes on his fingers and they followed along the best they could. I thought
back to the boy we had found in the street and the boy sitting in front of me. He
was given the opportunity to do good in this world, only along the way had
forgotten his eternal destiny.
Three months of living in rain and I
got a phone call, I was needed in another part of the country and I had to
leave immediately. I couldn’t believe it. As I stood by the taxi in the rain,
and said goodbye to my little brother, I looked at him in his clean white
shirt, a smile on his face, and his tattooed lips that only gave testimony to
the words he now spoke. It was at that moment that I thought about how much he
had changed. It was then that I saw the difference, the difference between the street
urchin I had found running from the cartels, and the strong teenager that stood
in front of me. I gave him a hug and it was then I felt I understood a small
amount more of the significance of being a child of God. We all have a chance
to grow, to change. The ability that Brandon had to change is the same given to
all of those that have lived, live and ever will live. That young man,
tattooed and in tattered clothes, has divine lineage.
