Campamento

I arrived for the summer in Argentina last May expecting to be pretty torn up by the poverty I was going to witness. I guess I was, but I don’t know that it ever really hit me. Going back 2 weekends ago, after spending a month and a half in Chile living with a servant who makes my food, cleans my room, and washes my clothes, something finally clicked. It happened after one of the speakers at the camp I was helping with finished. He talked about the story of the prodigal son, something that has been on my mind a lot lately. He said that no matter who you are, how screwed up your family is, even if your parents have never thought you were important, we have a father who truly does care about you like the father in the story. It was weird how that affected a bunch of the guys. A group of them who I was hanging out with a lot, all around high school age, just broke down. I don’t know how I never saw it before but after a crying 17 year old dude yelled to me (rough translation) “People think stuff like this is just a story, or a joke, but for us it’s reality! When I get home I have to go work every day to provide for my sister and my mom, I can’t finish school…” I finally got it. I think I needed to see them drop the facade of being ok with it all to really start to understand the pain.

You read about these things in Dickens novels, and I lived in the presence of it all summer, but somehow it didn’t hit me till that Sunday afternoon. I felt helpless in the face of something so big, a problem so ingrained in the lives and families of these guys that I couldn’t think of anything at all to say. It was like for the first time I looked at hopelessness without having to imagine its ugly face, it was staring straight at me.

And as I thought about it more and more I went through some possibilities in my mind. I though, “I’m an econ major, I know what it takes to create jobs, I could dedicate my life to helping with that so these guys can find jobs.” And then I realized that over half of them are like 13 and shouldn’t be working full times jobs anyway. So what do you do? You can’t make their fathers come back and love them! You can’t give them back that childhood that was ripped away. You can’t take away the memories of searching through the trash for food (which my friend Lauren told me afterward she knows of a least one little girl who has been forced to do that).

It was weird that then my thoughts would switch from these kids, whose need is so blaringly obvious to my friends at home, or here in Viña. I finally saw that naked hopelessness in their lives as well and I remembered something I wrote down the other day:

If there is no such thing as God then:

Nobody knows you

Nobody knows what you really desire

Nobody loves you more than they love themselves

Nobody loves you enough to give up everything for you, to be crushed for your sake, to take all the pain and hurt that is directed at you, bear it, die for it, and count it utterly worth that cost because they love you and you are the reward.

Nobody will ever understand you because you inhabit yourself, preoccupied with your own concerns, and so does everyone else. Your heart, your mind, all that is really you will never be understood or really loved by anybody. No matter how hard you try you will never be able to truly open yourself up to anybody.

And your life will be spent desiring this, desiring to unburden these cares and pains, these loves, or the beauty you see, and have somebody truly understand, unselfishly look at all who you are and say, “despite the times when you failed and the times when you were so blinded by selfishness you couldn’t love anyone, despite your fears, despite the lack of trust in even me, I love you, I want you, I am jealous of the spirit I put in you, I am the lover of your soul, I know you, and when your soul is full of groaning too deep to utter I understand you, and if you hurt I will take your pain, and if you are scared I will take your fear, for I will defend you and I will win—there is nothing greater than me and I am love.

If God is not, this will never happen; and this world with beauty you can never quite grasp and pleasures that are never quite complete is all you can ever hope for; and despite my best efforts, I will never understand, and I will never love you, and neither will anyone else because I, like you, like everyone, am selfish and blind and I cannot see who you really are.

With that I realized that even if I could make these kids fathers come back and provide for all of them economically, it still wouldn’t be enough. Because even the best loved and best provided for still lack that which we are all crying out for: real understanding, real selfless love, real provision. I though again about the story of the prodigal son, realizing that if Jesus didn’t really come and tell that story to illustrate how God loves us then the greatest and most successful social work in the world is incomplete and I think I would just give up because I can’t really change much of anything anyway.

The other day I was talking to my new friend Felipe and he said he thinks that there are the comfortably ignorant people and nihilists. I agree but I hope to God that there is a third category: those who are blissfully aware that there is hope in a God who loves them.