Buckets

When Robert unpacked his bags after coming back from Mexico, he handed me a flash drive with pictures of our team. I miss them. We are five families, four involving marriages across borders, and one involving six people just planted in a new culture, so all of us experienced in Oz moments.  Someone called it a ragtag team and compared it to the team that gathered around David in the wilderness, because this team, too, has gathered in a kind of structural wilderness around a common mentor and some common values. We all want to live incarnationally as we connect people in southern Mexico to Jesus. We want people’s response to Jesus to be as steeped in the flavor of their own culture and their own redeemed being as possible. We want the church at the end of the ages to be a vast crowd too great to count, from every nation and tribe and people and language, united as one body at last, worshipping not with one voice, but many, following not many voices but only One, with all our heart.

The advantage of being on a team is that you celebrate other people’s stories as if they were your own. Big organizations take good advantage of this fact about community, using resources to highlight, video, and publish people’s stories that might not otherwise be heard. Of course, on the other hand, some big organizations hide lots of awkward stuff behind the good stories, making us all just a bit more skeptical when we hear good stories bandied about. But this story happened to someone on my team in Oaxaca, and though I can’t show you a video, I can celebrate it with you.

Phil’s story:

Exhausted from a long day of mixing cement and carrying buckets of it to make the footings for his house, I sat with my friend Tadeo outside a store in our village.  As the sun set, we remarked on our hard work and our sore muscles.  As we sipped our cokes, Tadeo went back to something that had happened to him a few months ago.  At another job site, a fellow worker had clubbed him over the head with a 4x4 post, almost killing him.  He had called me to pick him up in that village, two hours away.  Later, he had told me more about the attack.  He explained that when the crew bosses started giving him more responsibility, it stirred up jealousy, and one man had attacked him in a drunken rage.  This much I knew already.

But today, Tadeo told me that since we had become friends, his perspective on life had changed.  Seeing how I loved and supported my wife Eunice as a doctor, he began to want that for his own family.   Now that he knew me, he knew life could be different for him.  He acknowledged that life was going to be harder because there were traditions in the village working against him (the pressure to drink was enormous), but he was thankful he now had a friend to guide him through.  We were two tough guys, just exhausted and almost in tears, sharing a moment neither of us expected.

Our time in the village has been one of struggle and success.  The clinic has helped hundreds of people from several villages, but people haven’t responded to God as we hoped.  Eunice and I knew it wouldn’t be a quick job, could even take years, but through the months we have struggled with doubt: were we going too slow?  But that night, sitting with Tadeo, God showed up.  During my ten years working in Mexico, I have seen churches born in small indigenous villages, but they usually lack young adult males.  These men should be the life blood of a healthy, growing and reproducing indigenous church, but these are the hardest to reach.  If a young church is filled only with women and children, people think this new religion is primarily for them.  Over the years, I have heard many men say that church is fine for their wives, but they don't need anything from a God who comes across as feminine.  Now Tadeo was telling me he trusted me to show him a new path toward a God that is for everyone in the family.  

I know that in his day, Phil has carried a lot of buckets of cement for neighbor’s house-building projects and played a lot of basketball. Eunice has treated a lot of patients. Paco has given a lot of people lifts and drunk a lot of cokes with people, one of whom he married. Now he has three more people in his family. Doug has checked out lots of peach trees, and Sarai has taught a lot of math lessons. Jason and Tifany have racked up miles and miles as they walk around meeting people with whom to practice their Spanish sentences. This story of Phil’s takes work. Takes time. Takes practice. And I celebrate Phil’s story, and all the team’s stories as they watch to catch God at work around them.