I'm A Heartless Monster - Observations from Behind the Barbed Wire

"To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless." - G.K. Chesterton

...or at least it often feels like I am.

Living in the midst of poverty is tough in all kinds of unexpected ways. It is easy to be crushed by feelings of helplessness in the face of such overwhelming tragedy. If you manage to survive that initial onslaught, you may well find your heart hardening - if only to allow you to make it as far as the supermarket without breaking down completely.

Sound a bit over dramatic? The hard truth is that this is very real part of a missionary's life and if anything I am probably understating it. Underneath all that, though, is hope to make a real difference. We just have to confront a few uncomfortable truths to get there.

Most of what you want to do will just make it worse.

I remember a kindly gentleman who was visiting from a Western country. If, by chance, he happens to read this post I do hope that I have not represented him unjustly - he is by all accounts a kind and generous man with a real heart for people who are suffering.

He shared with a few of us about how he was approached in the street by a beggar girl. "You should have seen her little face light up when I took a coin out of my pocket!" he told us.

My heart sank. How could I explain what he had done wrong? He was presented with an opportunity to make a difference, he had compassion and he had the means to act upon it. What could possibly be so wrong with giving a begging girl a coin or two?

The harsh reality is that, despite the award-winning smile, that coin served to sell that little girl and countless other children deeper into slavery, an exploitation that steals their childhood and forces them out onto the streets at the behest of unscrupulous adult masters.

To know this, and to see those children's faces as they, with nothing, beg you for a pittance you could easily afford and never miss... it is a torment. Oh, there are things you can do - my wife and I try to carry snacks with us to give to the children instead of money. Even that, though, can be easily twisted by their masters as sealed snacks are taken from them and resold for profit.

Your motivations do not matter.

There are many motivations we may have for giving money to a begging child. In the example above, the motivations were above reproach. Some, though, may give just to get rid of the nuisance child who is following you through the market, while others may give to assuage a feeling of guilt for having so much in a society that has so little.

I have heard people say things to the effect of "Well, my heart was in the right place," when confronted with the effects of their actions. That's fine - your heart was in the right place. But we need to get our heads in the right place, too. No matter what our motivation, the reality is that by reacting in this way to the poverty we see, we are proving that exploiting children is a lucrative business to get into.

You can't help everyone.

It is only natural that many missionaries are initially overwhelmed by the situation. Whatever we are actually here to do, it feels like we must do something about practically everything. All this does is make us ineffective at what we're actually there to do.

Mixed in with the compassion there is perhaps a certain arrogance we bring with us... the idea that now that a westerner is here, we can make everything better. We can't. But we can make some things better, and by narrowing our focus to the things we can actually help with, we accomplish far more than if we tried to change everything all at once.

That doesn't mean we stop caring about what we see, but I can do more for earthquake or typhoon victims by supporting and encouraging the people qualified to help them, and by advocating for them to people in my home country, than I could do by showing up, unqualified, and saying "I'm a westerner and I'm here to save you!"

You can't help anyone if you're curled up in a ball in the corner.
 
We see so much suffering right outside our door - and by door I mean six foot gate with another three feet of barbed wire on top. It's hard to feel like you're part of the community when you're doing so much to protect yourself from it.

We build up these barriers, both literally and metaphorically, to protect ourselves from what we see around us every day. It honestly does make a person feel a little less human. Without them, though, most of us would be complete wrecks and unable to do anything worthwhile.

Those barriers and boundaries look different for each of us but believe me, they are there. Finding the balance where we can be effective without being locked away from the world around us is one of the challenges of missionary life.

Our priorities will have changed when you see us next.

As I've mentioned in a previous post, missionaries can find it very difficult to relate to their home culture when they return. It's hard to place the same importance we once did on everyday life in our home countries when we have lived in the places we have.

It's not that we're necessarily being self-righteous or superior - though that is an easy trap for us to fall into - but that our priorities have been influenced by experiences that, however much we try, we cannot quite explain. Most people just have no frame of reference for what we're talking about.

Please, be patient with us missionaries when we return to you! Know that in many ways that are difficult to express, we have been broken by what we have seen. That may sometimes make us difficult to relate to.

But know this, also - if we have been broken, it is so that we can be reshaped. We need you to stand with us if we're to have any hope of real change in the world. And there is so very much hope - almost more overwhelming than the initial hopelessness we felt! We need your help to carry that hope, for the great realization that hits every missionary sooner or later is that we cannot do this alone.

Theo