Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory......

I attribute my current outlook in life and ability to view and glimpse hope, to a present and active God working through my social work education. It is my faith coupled with social work values of people of all shapes and sizes, those in the depths of despair and those on top of mountains, that helps me to grasp an understanding of a supernatural power at work, a God that would take our form and dwell among us so that we may understand a new way to live. Without realizing how my heart would be transformed I served as the benevolence coordinator for a large Baptist church while putting myself through my first years of seminary and the graduate social work program. I was able to view persons coming in for assistance with a strengths perspective and identify assets in their environments that provided both that individual and myself hope as we planned to get them through another day. I began to see how identical this was to the way Jesus viewed and lived among people. When Jesus saw people in their most broken state he saw hope for restoration. Learning to let some of the most marginalized in our society teach me the deepest lessons about faith helped me to not give up on my own beliefs.

With this filter I signed up to serve alongside a group on a mission trip to the heart of the Amazon basin this summer. My task was to be one of 30 Americans traveling to various villages by boat offering medical and dental services primarily but also providing entertainment for children and adults, concluding the day with a joint worship service. Although somewhat cynical about our typical American approach to missions I still desired to go and serve as best I could, hoping to learn from the people in return. What I didn’t expect was to encounter such a diverse American team. I had typically gone on mission trips with a bunch of middle to upperclass, church people who seemed to have it all together. This group was comprised of both church-goers and non-church-goers alike, various denominations and ages. One man, Fred (for the purposes of this article) in particular had not been to church in years. He found out he was going on the trip only a couple of weeks prior to leaving. He was hired to paint the trip leader’s house and one afternoon while taking a break from painting sat down at their piano and began to play hymns he recalled from his past. The trip leaders wife walked in and requested he play “It is well with my soul” as that was her recently deceased father’s favorite hymn. Fred played as she clung to pictures of her father and wept. He began to weep as he told me this story and claimed that that was the first time he had been used to minister to someone through music in years. He was a crack addict and had spent the last 10 years of his life losing his job, wife, kids and dignity, losing himself with every sexual act and despicable job he took just for a small amount of drugs to feed his addiction.

For the rest of the trip I visited late at night on the boat with this man and watched him as he threw himself fully into service, leading us by keyboard in worship and making himself available for any task that had to be done. Where the rest of us were quick to put up boundaries of what we were and were not willing to do for fear that we would be taken advantage of or would work harder than another, he did not hold back at all. One night during devotionals as the rest of us reflected on experiences of the day with the mindset that the villagers needed us and what all we had taught them…… Fred shared that perhaps we were there to learn from the villagers. He reflected on how many of the families lived together in the villages, how they ate meals together regularly and how close-nit the community was, neighbor taking care of neighbor. He said, “our friends in these villages don’t seem unhappy or in need at all, perhaps we are here to learn from them, our brothers and sisters.” This blew me away because I knew his story behind that reflection. Once again I was witnessing a moment where the world would tell us to give up on this man but Jesus hadn’t and Jesus was working through him in a powerful way. Throughout the gospel of Luke one can see where Jesus works through individuals and those whom are forgiven seem to know how to love much. I witnessed that, something straight out of the gospel, before my own eyes. Fred was given a second chance; this broken vessel was used by God to minister in powerful ways not only to our brothers and sisters living in poor villages along the Amazon but also to those of us pompous, successful American Christians supposedly on his team. He has experienced forgiveness and did not let anything hold him back from loving others around him that week so that we could seek the sources to experience and receive that forgiveness also.

The last night of our trip during devotional time we concluded with a foot-washing service. I have never participated in this before and when given the opportunity I’ve usually not attended out of fear. I was moved to do something out of the ordinary for myself however this particular evening. As our boat coasted down the moonlit Amazon away from the villages and towards the city of Manaus, the background music of the service stopped as the former addict and now profound musician and instrument of God wept while I washed his feet with water and my tears. The kingdom of God lies in such as these, my eyes glimpsed the glory of what God is daily trying to teach us and I’m so very thankful I listened this time.