Lord please give me the eyes to see how you see.
Pausing to absorb the scenery as I walk along the dusty roads of Puerto Barrios, I notice to my left sits a hibiscus bush intertwined in a metal fence. I come up close and gracefully lift the delicate red flower that hangs there, perfect in form. My eyes follow the plant down to the roots where garbage of all kind is scattered there below. Hmmm, waste birthing beauty instead of beauty birthing more beauty. Not what you'd expect.
Merriam-Webster defines irony as "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result; an event or result marked by such incongruity." Now I'm not here to give you a grammar lesson but over the last few weeks my mind cannot seem to get past all the ironies I am discovering here, starting with that flower. The next place a sense of irony settled upon me was the dump.
There is a community that lives at the dump where my team and I bring lunch weekly. I do not yet know all of their stories but somewhere along the way their desperation led them to this place. A place where survival is the only priority. A place where finding a bucket of chicken in the garbage is a blessed feast for the family (a scene I witnessed first hand). A place where you take life one meal at a time.
In the States it seems barely possible to have happiness, let alone lasting joy. If your neighbor has a bigger boat or the next big tech craze, we question our success. We are content only until Apple comes out with some new version of Iwhatever, then happiness ends.
So imagine my surprise to find joy in the eyes of these men, women and children living in literal waste. But that's what I found there. There is a happiness in their faces in the midst of desperation that just cannot be explained. Incongruent. Ironic.
Recently I experienced a different side of irony at the dump. This past week when we served lunch I kept noticing how these people were actually serving us. Children offered us their water and candy, families welcomed us in, one girl even moved me out of the hot sun into the shade.
A group that has nothing to offer except what they have found in the garbage gave us, people that came to serve them, more than we gave. They gave us everything. So ironic that I thought I have so much to give these people who have nothing and then I found that in their nothingness they have infinitely more to give.
In some of the churches there is also a certain level of irony. A very tangible darkness is present here in Guatemala that pulls the men into the bars to blow all of their money on booze and prostitutes. They work all week to get this weekend high.
The church, on the other hand, should rescue them from this cycle of living for the high and point them to truth and redemption. Instead I've seen in the case of some churches the worldly high is just exchanged for a "spiritual" high. People work all week so that on the weekend they can go to church and have a crazy emotional experience to make them feel close to God.
Ironically, they are craving the same thing the men in the bars are craving. That is intimacy and freedom. The difference is people in church return again and again in order to gain that which they already possess. It's ironic that they are advertising rescue while maintaining the lifestyle of people enslaved to sin by promoting an experience rather than a Person.
It's funny though, as I considered all of these ironies it dawned on me that I have been living in the biggest irony of all time. The Creator birthed that which would cause death. And one step further, what was created would kill the Creator. Okay now one more step, the Creator knew it.
He knew before even the beginning, before even beginning time. He knew that creating us sinful beings that reject Him every day would mean He would have to die. And He still chose us. No one would ever create that which would kill them and yet He did. It now makes sense to me that the Creator of irony would be the source of the most beautiful irony this world will ever know.
Psalm 19:1 "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork."
Lord, please continue to show me that even the intangible things like irony and the unexpected still point to you, the Creator of them all.
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