Tattoos

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.