Perhaps one of the questions I ask God most frequently is, "Why?" I see the pain and suffering around me and in the world and my heart tightens. I feel nauseous and I don't understand how I can literally be curled up in a blanket as I write this, comforted by the the beautiful Christmas lights and know that millions are cold, hungry, sick and dying... knowing that women are being raped, men are being tortured, children are starving and all of creation is groaning. Do we exist in parallel universes? Sometimes I wonder... we might as well. How can it be so drastically different, yet confined to the same planet?
Last week I read an ethnography about slums in Brazil... and how mothers are literally put into situations where they have to choose which child to starve to death. The systems and structures that are in place force her to make these decisions; the death of hundreds of children can be traced to selective neglect. The anthropologist (Scheper-Hughes) wrote about her first encounter with a child who was wasting away. As a survival instinct, the mother chose to let him starve, lest he literally suck the life out of her withered body. Scheper-Hughes swooped in and took the child under her own wing. She nursed him back to life and watched his hair grow, his eyes gain life and skin look healthier. When she succeeded in convincing the mother that he was worth investing resources into, the mother finally took him back. He became her favorite son, only to die from gang violence as a teenager. The entire article was depressing. Class the next week was very similar. Our professor Tomi shared other stories from her own fieldwork in the slums of Brazil. She recalls a time when she was robbed at knifepoint and her aggressor apologized, "I'm sorry, but I need this money more than you do." She remembered when a mother begged Tomi to take her baby, recognizing that she'd never be able to give own daughter the kind of life Tomi would be capable of providing.
I struggled through that week of class. I breathed a sigh of relief when the week was over only to come into class the next week and watch a horrifying documentary about the violence against women in Ciudad de Juarez, Mexico. In a span of less than 20 years, over 400 women were abducted, abused, tortured, raped and murdered in Juarez. The families of the victims clamored for justice, but found none from the government. Instead, the government itself was often responsible for acts of violence as well. Family members would desperately pull together neighbors and friends as they went out into the desert looking for a corpse. Time after time, they'd come back empty handed only to have the authorities find a skeleton the next day. Mothers refused to believe that their daughters who had disappeared only weeks before would already be reduced to a bag of bones. Dozens of women later and by the end of the documentary, justice had still not come. My heart ached.
During these two weeks of depressing and painful anthropology classes, I found out about two neighborhoods in Colombia that are in need of your prayers. The first is Ciudad Bolivar, a barrio alto of Bogota. It lays to the south of Bogota, nestled in the mountains. Living conditions are less than acceptable and the poverty and violence statistics are through the roof! Our school has partnered with a beautiful ministry there, Forjadores de Aguilas, to help bring justice and healing to this neighborhood. I honestly have not been to Ciudad Bolivar since 10th grade, but have beautiful memories from the kids there :) However, recently a new wave of violence has swept through the city. Women are raped, men are senselessly killed and children are orphaned. I haven't been able to get much information about what exactly is going on or for how long it has been going because the press is silent. When I find out more information, I will certainly update you guys :).
The other neighborhood is Barrio Egipto. If you've been following my blog, then you certainly know plenty about it. If you haven't been, however, feel free to check out this post to get some background information. I must admit that much of the ministry going on with the Fundacion Buena Semilla inside the neighborhood had fallen into the background for me. I prayed for it occasionally and read the updates, but other than that, I kind of had forgotten about the situation to a great extent. However, my mom reminded me how I need to KEEP PRAYING for this neighborhood. One of the six gang members who was involved with robbing the GEBC team was stabbed to death a couple of weeks ago. He appears in this video next to Elias. Please, watch that video! It tells you ways you can partner with this incredible ministry to continue bringing light into Barrio Egipto. Though much has happened in the last six months within that neighborhood, greater things are yet to come... I have to believe that.
During my devotions this week I was comforted by the fact that God feels. He hurts and is grieved when his creation suffers. It's easy for me to shake my fist at God and point to the suffering all around me and ask, "Where are you?" It's easy for me to judge his justice and question his goodness. It's easy to do that. It's hard to believe in God's compassion sometimes. So many times I cry out to God and ask why this is happening to "them"-- forgetting that he knows each one by name. One of my Beth Moore Bible studies concluded by saying, "Beloved, God still feels."
And that... that is overwhelming.
Beloved, God still feels.
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