I’ve been privileged to do some exciting things in my life, some things that seemed really important or significant at the time. I was the senior speaker when I graduated from Bible College, and spoke to hundreds of students and highly educated faculty. That was a big deal to me. I’ve been on radio and television. I’ve preached the gospel to a jungle village where it had never been heard before. I’ve been before secular crowds as the only Christian minister. You get nervous or excited at such opportunities, and think you’re really doing something significant.
Other times you have less exciting prospects as you head out for the day, but end up experiencing something unexpected that deeply touches your life. Sometimes it’s only as you look back that you realize that day was just as important, and what you did was just as great as anything else you might have done on those exciting days. I’d like to share one of those times with you.
From 1985 – 1991, I was serving the Lord with a ministry called Youth with a Mission. My family and I lived in El Paso, Texas, but most of my ministry work was done in our Mexican sister city, Ciudad Juarez, located just across the border and the misnamed Rio “Grande” River. I had learned Spanish at a language school run by YWAM after first completing their mandatory 5-month-long Discipleship Training School.
The methodology employed at the language school was to spend mornings learning grammar and vocabulary at our base in El Paso, then go to Juarez in the afternoons to walk door-to-door and practice with anybody we could find at home. In that way I had become sufficiently fluent to carry out ministry in Mexico. Even after finishing the language school, I still spent a lot of time going door-to-door in Juarez, practicing my Spanish, and developing relationships with the people. We also carried on various Bible Studies and evangelistic outreaches.
On Monday, December 5, 1988, the weekend was over, so we were back at our work of evangelism and service. Some weeks before, I had decided to begin visiting a neighborhood (the Mexicans called them “colonias”) that was controlled by the communist party or CDP. This area was one of the poorest in Juarez. All the houses were made of cardboard, with dirt floors or bare concrete, and roofs made of rusted corrugated metal, or of whatever other types of material the families could scrounge. Old tires were laid on top of the roofing material to hold it down against the fierce winds and dust storms of that desert region.
Most of the people there had no running water. Instead, they had 55-gallon drums in front of their shacks, filled once a week or so by a water truck that rumbled by. The land was never bulldozed where these squatters lived, so it wasn’t like any American neighborhood. Shacks were scattered all over the rough little hills and arroyos, and the dirt roads were really rugged. Those who had electricity got it by actually putting ladders up against the power lines and illegally tapping into them. Wires were strung haphazardly all over the place. Very few of the people had cars. Those who did drove beat-up wrecks with cracks in their windshields and primer for paint. Blue oil smoke billowed from their tailpipes as they lurched over the roads at slow speeds. No vehicle lasted long under those conditions!
Some people used propane heaters for winter’s cold, and every year we heard stories of people dying of carbon monoxide poisoning during the night. Probably a greater number used a type of wood-burning stove produced right there in the colonias. During one of my door-to-door visits, I came upon a house where the owner made a living fabricating these stoves. He showed me how he used sheet metal from junked automobiles to make them, hammering the sheet metal on an anvil, and in that way cutting it without the use of any saw. By this method, he made all the pieces needed to produce little stoves. Each stove had a door you could open to put the wood in, a smaller chamber below to allow air to flow, and a pipe that came out the back to carry away the smoke.
Living as we did in the middle of the vast Chihuahuan desert, there was no access to real firewood, and these poor Mexicans could certainly not pay for such wood to be brought in from forests located many hours away. As a result, they burned whatever they could find. Various carpentry or furniture shops in the city sold leftover wood pieces or sawdust, and this is what the poor burned in their stoves to keep warm, along with trash, tires, old toys, or anything else they could find.
Near this particular colonia, there was also an area where the people made adobe bricks just the way the ancients had. I often saw them treading mud with their bare feet in the burning heat of summer or the freezing cold of winter. The mud was then slapped into molds, and the bricks thus formed were slung out upon the ground to dry. Once they’d been sufficiently dried and hardened by the sun, they’d be placed in kilns made of the same bricks, which looked a lot like many of the houses in this area. Old tires were lit under the stacked bricks, and once they were blazing, workers would then switch to sawdust as fuel. This was trucked in from sawmills or carpentry shops, and dumped in piles outside each kiln. With the sawdust as fuel, workers would keep the fires burning for 24 hours at a time to harden the bricks. In the wintertime, this brick making produced an awful mix of black smoke from the burning tires, wood-smoke from the sawdust, and a pall of dust kicked up by all the rumbling trucks and old, oil-burning cars. This pall hung low over the colonias, kept there by the effects of an inversion layer. I remember gazing at the setting sun as it sank one day into that dense cloud of dust and smoke, and thinking how much the place looked like a vision of hell!
It was into this wretched area that I came trudging along door to door that cold December day, accompanied by a fellow Ywammer named Becky. We approached one little cardboard shack and called at the front door to see if anyone was home. The “door” was really just a wooden frame with plastic tacked around it, and it was so warped the lady of the house struggled to drag it open and let us in. We stepped inside and looked around. The little shack was full of smoke from the pot-bellied stove because it seemed to have a broken or defective exit pipe. We saw a baby on a broken-down bed, bundled up in cheap Mexican blankets. The lady explained that he was having respiratory problems. I thought to myself, “Who wouldn’t in this smoky place?!” She also explained that when her baby was born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck, and he was apparently not tended to right away. As a result, he wasn’t normal mentally or physically, but was disabled for life.
There didn’t seem to be a man around, and I don’t remember ever asking if she had a husband. After talking a while, the lady shared with us that she had no food for herself or the baby boy, whose name, we learned, was Rafael. Becky and I went to a local tienda to buy a few things for this impoverished mother and child. We dropped them off, and promised to come back the following day to see if we could be of any further assistance.
Returning to the battered YWAM station wagon, we drove back to El Paso, praying for this woman and thinking about what we might be able to do to help her. It wasn’t emotional or exciting; it was just the kind of mundane, ordinary stuff we did every week. The next day, I drove to the stove maker’s house and was able to buy a newly minted stove and exit pipe for just a few dollars. I took that to the lady’s house and in short order, was able to install it for her. Now at least they could have some warmth without choking to death on smoke.
Then I loaded mother and child into the car and took them to Dr. Guillermo Armijo’s office. He was a pediatrician and good friend who, along with his wife Yoli, attended the same church we did in El Paso. Dr. Armijo, who we called “Memo,” could have practiced medicine in El Paso and made more money. But he chose to serve his own people instead, so his office was in Juarez. I brought little Rafael to him, and he spent some time with him, checking his vitals, and listening with his stethoscope. Memo felt the child was in serious enough condition to warrant spending some time in a hospital, so he explained to me how to get them to the General hospital downtown.
The Mexican health care system is making progress; it’s better than it used to be. But back then, it was really sad, and the conditions were pitiful. As an American, I was pretty appalled by what I saw in that place; the crowded conditions, the overall uncleanness, and the poor equipment. Nevertheless, we got this lady to the pediatric department, and together, we sat in the waiting area for a long time. After a while, I went to find a restroom. When I came back, the lady and child were gone. I figured they must have been called in to see a doctor, so I began to search for them.
As I passed a slightly opened door, I thought I saw the woman. I peered in to make sure. She was turned sideways, so she couldn’t see me. As I was about to enter the room, I overheard her voice and stopped, thinking she was in a conversation with someone. I hesitated outside, straining to hear her words. What I heard and saw so touched me I’ve never forgotten it.
She was having a conversation all right, but it wasn’t with anyone you could see with earthly eyes. She was praying to God. Suddenly she lifted her little disabled child and held him up high, as if offering him to God, and with tears in her eyes, cried out in Spanish, “¡Señor Jesus, ten misericordia de nosotros!” (Lord Jesus, have mercy on us!”)
It was as desperate a cry as I’ve ever heard, and it impacted me very strongly. I was overcome with emotion, emotion I still feel as I write these words. I didn’t want to intrude right then, so I turned away. It seemed too personal, too raw, maybe too vulnerable. I walked the floors for a while before eventually coming back and finding them again.
The doctors at the hospital prescribed some medications to help the boy recover. If I remember right, he stayed there in the hospital for one night. Dr. Armijo came to check on him later as well. We finally were able to take mother and child home to their little shack with its crude, but improved, heating system. We only saw them a few more times as time went by. It was just one more little incident in a long list of many such incidents I experienced in my years there in Juarez.
Nevertheless, I never forgot that experience, and that mother’s desperation as she cried out to God for her child. I don’t understand why some people have it so hard in life, while others of us enjoy so many benefits.
Little Rafael, even if he’d been born normally, with no complications, would probably have had a very hard life. He would have grown up in abject poverty with no father and very few opportunities. But he never even had that much of a chance, suffering a major setback from his birth. Because his mother was poor, the medical personnel attending to her and her baby were probably over-extended and (apparently) just didn’t pay attention as they should have. As a result, Rafael was born with many strikes already against him. What happened to him and his mother, as she tried to cope with all the setbacks she had to face? I surely don’t know, and I cannot understand.
There are a few things I do know though. I do know that baby and his mother were important to God, and He listened to her cries in that hospital. I know this because the Bible says it, but also because even before she cried, it was God who had led me to that poor colonia and to the warped door of their cardboard shack. He had shown me the man who made stoves and put the dollars I needed to buy one in my wallet. He had guided me to Memo, and put into Memo’s heart the desire and willingness to help the poor among his people.
I don’t know what became of Rafael and his mother, but I know that God loves them. He doesn’t explain all the suffering in this world or why He doesn’t stop it. We only know that someday He will. In the meantime, He’s here with us in it, and He feels our pain and sorrow. I know that when anyone, anywhere in the world cries to Him for mercy and help, He is listening, and has promised to respond, and that especially applies to the poor, the widows, and the orphans, those who are most needy and without resources.
As I think back, I realize how privileged I was to be an instrument in His hands that day, and play a small role in that family’s lives. It was very simple, mundane work anyone could have done, and those poor people were certainly not famous or important in the eyes of the world. Yet they were as important to God as any high-ranking king or president, and I was blessed to be able to serve them in His name.
I guess it all goes to show that real significance may be different from what we imagined it to be.