“We live out our call most fully when we are a community of faith with arms wrapped about a community of pain.” — John M. Perkins
At first glance you could be in the US. Maybe Florida or some coastal town, due to the palms and banana trees. The lawns are well manicured and the houses fine and expensive looking. You have to take a closer look to spot the thorns of an acacia tree to begin to see Africa. Even more telling of the location are the man-made thorns of the concertina wire that line the tops of the perimeter walls. Some go the extra mile and embed shards of broken glass into the cement, so that even if some intrepid soul muscles up the courage to deal with the wire, they would render their hands useless trying to find a handhold on the jagged edges that glint like the teeth of sharks in the sun.
The need for security is so commonplace in East Africa that you start to not even notice it after a while. Petty theft and breaking and entering are so unexceptional that if you have anything worth protecting, you’d better put it behind an imposing, locked gate. I find it to be a rule, that the more you have, the more afraid you are of losing it. Thus, we build walls, we put up fences, we construct storehouses with padlocks for all of our goods. It is, after all, far easier to top a wall with glass and barbed wire than to work towards a society that would eliminate the need for my neighbor to consider robbing me in the first place.
The truth of it all is, if you actually step outside of your walls and work towards justice, you very quickly find yourself a victim to injustices yourself. When you open yourself to work with the discriminated and disadvantaged, the ones harassed and extorted by the very corrupt local officials charged with keeping them safe, you open yourself to harassment and extortion as well.
I can’t compare the injustices I come up against with those of my neighbors and friends. I have resources they don’t. I have a government that — most of the time — will work to help me if I avail myself of their means. I’m not a refugee. Which also means that I can leave at anytime I want. I choose to be here now and if one day it gets too hard, I can choose to pack up my family and go. My friends don’t have that luxury.
Yet, I have chosen to be here. Therefore, I do end up, not immersed in the same mires of injustice my friends experience, but touched by them, stained and sometimes scarred by their effects.
Most of us, most of the time think that when we work for justice, for the valleys to be made level — an even playing field for us all — that we will effect change. That we will topple unjust and perverted systems of oppression. And sometimes we do. But mostly, we forget that the mountains also have to be brought low for the ground to be level. As it turns out, much of working to topple injustices involves subjecting yourself to feel the sting of them too.
We want to work for a better world from the comfort of our own safe spaces. But the world doesn’t get better when I stay locked inside the safety of my concertina wired walls. It only improves when I am willing to open my gates, to let my thieving neighbor into my house and truly seek to understand the systems that have led him to accepting that robbery was his only choice.
I claim to follow the example of Jesus, working for the good of my neighbors. But Jesus ended up with scars on his back, in his hands, his side. Instead of hiding behind a wall of thorns, Jesus stepped into the world and felt his brow pierced by them. Yes, he turned over tables and drove out the corrupt leaders and businessmen. And they killed him for it. Yes, he upheld the cause of the widow and the foreigner and those in power put nails through his hands because of it. Jesus worked to bring us back to a righteous and just relationship with God and with man, by stepping outside of the walls of safety and comfort and they hung him there on a tree, outside the walls.
Why do I expect different? Most of the world thinks they want justice. But most of us — myself fully included — don’t want to admit the dark truth that justice demands sacrifice. If I am to work for justice, I have to lay down my life for the friend beside me. I have to die a little each day. If I want to work for a world where my African friend doesn’t have to pay a bribe just to walk from one end of the street to the other, or to make it to work on time, I too have to stare into the eyes of the soldier in front of me, the one using his power to extort me and I too must suffer this indignity even though I’ve done nothing wrong. But this is the choice I have made. To follow the example of Jesus outside the gates, outside the walls. And out here there are wolves and there are wars. Out here there is suffering on scales we can’t imagine behind our secure barricades.
But every once in a while you get a glimpse of something good, of justice shining through the cracks and the bullet holes. Every once in a while you get to see the promised future coming to fruition today. Sometimes, you get to watch people who have been told they have no voice, recognize their potential to tell their own stories. You get to celebrate and uplift the culture of unwanted people. You get to sit with a woman at a well and tell her just how unimaginably loved she truly is. If you are willing to let injustice stain your clothes and mark your hands, sometimes, you get to see justice roll down.
