Reality

I'm leaving for Venezuela next Tuesday. I've been thinking quite a bit about the trip, so I'll likely be talking about it here some too. I'll be there for eight days, staying in a barrio on the edge of Caracas, with my coworker and friend Andy the Video Boy. Of course, I'll have a camera or two with me.

The organization I work with has a staff family who lives right there in the middle of everything -- John and Birgit and their three kids -- who we will be staying with. I have been doing some advance preparation for the trip and I talked with John last week about what they do in the barrios. I asked him to describe the purpose of their work. He paused for only a second before answering. "It's pretty simple, I guess," he said. "We are trying to be practical; we ask ourselves questions like 'how can we live out the gospel of Christ here so that the murder rate in our community goes down?'" It's a rough place and I'll admit that there is a part of me that is a bit nervous about our time on the street, but that tingling at my fingertips and in my gut is serving a few better purposes as well.

First, it challenges me to observe intently while I'm there, to put away my tendency to be absorbed in my own affairs. If my job description is to be a communicator, how can I communicate this?

Like my friend Patrick reminded me this weekend, it also challenges me to pray. In the long term, it won't be me that changes the world. Transformation will need to come from someone greater than I.

And it also challenges me to make an effort to participate in the reality of life in the barrio. If I am nervous to spend one week there, what must it be like to live there day in and day out?

As a general rule, I tend to get a little anxious sometimes. I've found this to be the case especially when I venture out to foreign places, outside of my circle of safety, away from the known. I've decided, for one thing, that this is just how the game goes and, for another, that if I give in to that rule, the world will somehow be diminished. Hiding the lamp when you're out on a dark night doesn't do anyone any good. So I am pushing myself to be open and receptive, compassionate, generous -- in other words, to live in the real world, rather than in some cocoon I've woven around myself. Like I said, this can be frightening. I think that's a good thing.