Monday, May 09, 2005
A Stroll in Hell
For the past couple weeks I’ve been in Indonesia trying to help with development work. The relief work has now shifted to development. You will hear less and less about Banda Aceh as time goes on. It’s not the top story on the nightly news now and hasn’t been for a few weeks. However, most people there still suffer dramatically in every dimension and will for years to come. The media and current events must not drive our action – it must be our love and eternal perspective – everything else falls short. Now that it’s into development, it falls into that endless pit of "just another place on the map" where people have it hard.
The tsunami broke all our hearts and people came from every part of the world and every ideology to serve regardless of their perspective because people were hurting. That’s good. But please don’t forget – thousands die daily from starvation, lack of pure water, war, famine – and there is no one to grieve over them. When I’m in an undeveloped or developing nation, and see human carnage and often dead bodies on the side of the road, my heart breaks that they’re left like a dog hit in the road. It gives a few yelps, dies, and then cars just drive around it until someone pushes it out of the way or it desintegrates right where it died over time.
I took a stroll in hell the other day. It was Gehenna, the place Jesus talked about that you don’t want to go to when you die. I literally saw garbage piled for miles, hundreds of feet into the air. Paper, furniture, rotting left over food, all kinds of waste – even dead bodies slowly smoldering – couldn’t tell if they were human or animal. The stench was over-powering. Fires were everywhere to burn and condense – it burned your eyes and the smoke got deep in your clothes. This was every bit as bad – if not worse – than Banda Aceh. In the haze of the smoke and humidity I could make out people like sticks – bending over with baskets on their backs. These were treasure hunters – filling their baskets with metal to be sold, half-eaten food, to be taken home, used sanitary napkins to be taken home, washed out, and used again. I want to vomit and cry at the same time.
I followed them into their maze and the deeper I got the more I couldn’t believe what I saw – Hell has villages. Houses built on top of garbage, anchored by old twine. Men and women, husbands and wives, children – most half-naked. They had their own economy there – bartering trash – with even a Mafia that made you pay so much to live there and give them so much of what you gathered – no escaping this hell. As unbelievable and crazy as it was, people smiled there. Resolved to their fate determined to be happy – some were born in hell, it was all they had ever known, to them it was normal – a playground of trash and garbage.
This hell was not made by God though, this hell was made by man – yet they have no Savior. As I walked in Hell with my friends who wanted me to see it, I was bombarded by so many questions. How can this be? Why hasn’t someone done something? A lady had taken me there – a very very successful lady who has micro-finance institutes and humanitarian endeavors with all her other secular businesses – she’s a giver. We all wept as we began to talk about what we could do. She told me that there were probably a thousand places like that in Jakarta -–on each dump at least a thousand people or more lived.
The questions began to flow even more. What would Jesus do? (I don’t mean a flippant reminder either of should I be nice to someone or not!) How can I say I know him and not do something? How can I walk away from this place? Then my friend Sophia summarized it in a powerful way, "Bob, when I see this I am not just confronted with them – but I am confronted with myself." Wow – profound wisdom! Our response to a crisis is human. Our response to on-going difficulty that people forget that isn’t in the news is divine. Our lack of response speaks volumes of who we are. It exposes what we really believe our mission on earth is here for. It says also, what kind of power our God has in our own lives to be agents of redemption – to not just stroll through Hell out of curiosity – but to bring them into our arms and rush them out.
Thank you Jesus, you went to Hell to pull us out. May we let no man stay there but be his redemption through your redemption. Bless me? You already have! With your abundance let me bless them.
The tsunami broke all our hearts and people came from every part of the world and every ideology to serve regardless of their perspective because people were hurting. That’s good. But please don’t forget – thousands die daily from starvation, lack of pure water, war, famine – and there is no one to grieve over them. When I’m in an undeveloped or developing nation, and see human carnage and often dead bodies on the side of the road, my heart breaks that they’re left like a dog hit in the road. It gives a few yelps, dies, and then cars just drive around it until someone pushes it out of the way or it desintegrates right where it died over time.
I took a stroll in hell the other day. It was Gehenna, the place Jesus talked about that you don’t want to go to when you die. I literally saw garbage piled for miles, hundreds of feet into the air. Paper, furniture, rotting left over food, all kinds of waste – even dead bodies slowly smoldering – couldn’t tell if they were human or animal. The stench was over-powering. Fires were everywhere to burn and condense – it burned your eyes and the smoke got deep in your clothes. This was every bit as bad – if not worse – than Banda Aceh. In the haze of the smoke and humidity I could make out people like sticks – bending over with baskets on their backs. These were treasure hunters – filling their baskets with metal to be sold, half-eaten food, to be taken home, used sanitary napkins to be taken home, washed out, and used again. I want to vomit and cry at the same time.
I followed them into their maze and the deeper I got the more I couldn’t believe what I saw – Hell has villages. Houses built on top of garbage, anchored by old twine. Men and women, husbands and wives, children – most half-naked. They had their own economy there – bartering trash – with even a Mafia that made you pay so much to live there and give them so much of what you gathered – no escaping this hell. As unbelievable and crazy as it was, people smiled there. Resolved to their fate determined to be happy – some were born in hell, it was all they had ever known, to them it was normal – a playground of trash and garbage.
This hell was not made by God though, this hell was made by man – yet they have no Savior. As I walked in Hell with my friends who wanted me to see it, I was bombarded by so many questions. How can this be? Why hasn’t someone done something? A lady had taken me there – a very very successful lady who has micro-finance institutes and humanitarian endeavors with all her other secular businesses – she’s a giver. We all wept as we began to talk about what we could do. She told me that there were probably a thousand places like that in Jakarta -–on each dump at least a thousand people or more lived.
The questions began to flow even more. What would Jesus do? (I don’t mean a flippant reminder either of should I be nice to someone or not!) How can I say I know him and not do something? How can I walk away from this place? Then my friend Sophia summarized it in a powerful way, "Bob, when I see this I am not just confronted with them – but I am confronted with myself." Wow – profound wisdom! Our response to a crisis is human. Our response to on-going difficulty that people forget that isn’t in the news is divine. Our lack of response speaks volumes of who we are. It exposes what we really believe our mission on earth is here for. It says also, what kind of power our God has in our own lives to be agents of redemption – to not just stroll through Hell out of curiosity – but to bring them into our arms and rush them out.
Thank you Jesus, you went to Hell to pull us out. May we let no man stay there but be his redemption through your redemption. Bless me? You already have! With your abundance let me bless them.
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