Yesterday, following the launch of TEAR Fund’s latest campaign (Pay it Forward, which will be public soon) we had the opportunity to hear one of our colleagues talk about her recent experience in India. She had visited areas that I visited while I was there in 2009 and she had captured some wonderful photos showing the beauty and dignity of children and families who live in the slums around cities like Delhi. She also captured some of the sadder reality – children living off rubbish dumps. At TEAR Fund we won’t show images of the latter because we want to maintain people’s dignity. There is always that fine line of wanting to convey reality, but not wanting to degrade people in the process. Showing dirty, half naked children is not what we’re about even though that’s the reality of many of the places where our partners work.
I saw the pictures of the children living off rubbish dumps, foraging for scraps they could sell, moving amongst pigs – a place where the pigs give birth – the children dirty with layers of grime because washing would use water, a precious commodity. My colleague spoke of one of the girls in her photo who spent each day at the rubbish site searching barefoot amongst glass, sewerage and filth to find scraps of metal she could sell at the end of the day for the equivalent of around 20c (NZD). You could sense the struggle, the tearing away of their humanity and the opening words of Psalm 22, which I recently reflected on, were ringing in my head; not for myself, but for that situation:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?
It’s not in my own life where God feels the most distant, it’s in those sort of situations and worse. In my job I hear about some horrific things. With that stuff present it would be easy to walk away from my faith but then, like David in Psalm 22, I have the ‘yet’ of verse 3 (‘yet you are enthroned as the Holy One…’) and verse 9 (‘yet you brought me out of my mother’s womb…’). Psalm 22 David wrestles between the things he sees and feels, and what he knows to be true of God. The latter is the ‘yet.’
When I look at the life of Jesus I am faced with the ‘yet’ and today as I delivered communion to a group of mums I took the chance to remind us of the ‘yet’. Children live off rubbish dumps, their humanity degraded, yet God has demonstrated a closeness to the suffering; he became one of them. People are subjected to death in conflicts that don’t need to happen, yet in Jesus and the resurrection we glimpse new life and the defeat of death.
It is this ‘yet’ that we hold in front of us as we pray in the communion liturgy:
Send your Holy Spirit that these gifts of bread and wine which we receive may be to us the body and blood of Christ, and that we, filled with the Spirit’s grace and power, may be renewed for the service of your kingdom.
That ‘yet’ of Psalm 22 is what fuels us and drives us to not wallow in the brokenness we face ourselves and see so clearly in the world around us in the lives of the children like those living off rubbish dumps. Like David we acknowledge how we feel and what we see, but we cling to the a bigger truth above what we perceive and move forward trusting in the God of the ‘yet’.