“Oh child, let’s get to work.” By Hayley Dennison
February 10th, 2012Feb. 10, 2012 – “That’s interesting … That’s really interesting,” I said in response to her, my friend, who was telling me, “I don’t believe in God.”
This occurred three weeks ago up on the Goat Trail. For me this situation may have been similar to what my sister-in-law talks about when she tells this story:
Her parents are from Serbia, so she speaks Serbian and she always had this fantasy that some day she’d come upon some people speaking Serbian and they’d be expecting nobody around them to understand, and she’d expose a plan to rob a bank or something of that magnitude.
Her big moment took place just last year while grocery shopping. She turned her cart down an aisle and came upon two young men making fun of all the other shoppers as they passed. As my sister-in-law passed by, she glared at one of the men in particular who seemed to be delivering the majority of the insults. He looked her straight in the eye and in Serbian said, “What are looking at?” To which she replied in Serbian, “Whatever the heck I want to look at, ya big jerk, and if you don’t go up to that lady, the one who’s buying the Oreos, who from your perspective shouldn’t be buying the Oreos, and pay her a compliment, I’m gonna tell everybody in this store what you’ve been saying about them.”
My sister-in-law continues with her story, saying that these young guys approached this woman telling her of their admiration for her sweater and it seemingly made her day.
Unlike my sister-in-law, I didn’t deliver. As a Christian, I expect we have a similar opportunity when we come upon someone in our life who claims not to believe in God, when we discover there is someone with whom we are in frequent contact suffering from spiritual poverty.
Pastor Scott asked me to explore my recent trip to Guatemala in the context of our “Hunger Awareness” theme today.
My struggle commenced when I began to consider Guatemala and my time there. Images of the impoverished children who sold their wares on the sides of the streets very vividly returned to mind. I feel and admittedly, not 100 percent justified, that I did good there. I used my skills and God-given gifts and helped people.
I can just see it. Two months ago in Guatemala God is looking down on me, evaluating what I’m doing and likely saying: “With you my daughter I am well pleased.” Fast forward to three weeks ago and I’m sure he thought, “Oh, child. Forget what I said back in October. We’ve got some work to do!”
It’s just that in the face of hunger and social injustice, I know what to do. We’ll feed you, we’ll perform free surgeries, and yes, my heart aches a little when I think of Felix, a native Guatemalan who came to our hotel the night of our departure. He had fifty bags of coffee with him. The beans had been picked the day before and just roasted that day – the bags were still warm. And he had macadamia nuts – same drill with those!
But don’t you worry. We left behind an entire case of Kenny’s candy, cuz it’s manufactured in Perham, Minnesota, “donchaknow.” Consider the irony – a country so poor, children die in the streets every day – and they gift us with the nourishment of God’s bounty. And us, people from the wealthiest country in the world, and we leave behind a box of candy that supplies no nourishment whatsoever.
But I don’t want to miscommunicate. I don’t mean to minimize the devastating effects of hunger in this world. It’s just that I feel so ill-equipped when it comes to the hunger one experiences when they have a spiritual void.
So my hunger awareness message is this. There are likely people close to you who don’t know where they sit with this whole God thing, and I think we’re called to feed those people just as we are to feed those who are physically hungry.
By,
Hayley Dennison
Hayley Dennison is the Village R.N. She traveled to Guatemala in October of 2011 with a surgeon from the Minnesota hospital where she worked before coming to Holden. Seventy-five surgeries were performed in five days, including gall bladder removal, hernia repairs and appendectomies.