Guest Post: The Taste that Stays with Me

Travis Barnwell, a dear friend, Christian brother, and former roommate, has been in Kenya with us from day one. Like me, he has been working for JRS, though in a different neighborhood. It is a real blessing to be able to talk through things we are seeing and experiencing on the ground, encouraging each other spiritually, and brainstorming programmatic steps together.

Shortly before the actual World Refugee Day, Travis was explaining his thoughts on hearing a Bishop speak about how we are all refugees, trying to find our way back home. Travis' words were engrossing and made us wish for more thoughts on the subject. We asked him to write a guest post on our blog and what followed were weeks of cajoling, prompting, and begging, though never demanding. Eventually, we lost hope. Yet it turned out that people from Travis' small group from church were also cajoling, prompting, begging, and I think demanding.

So here, without further ado, is a guest post from Travis, where he explains in further detail the conclusions he is drawing from his experiences with JRS:

The first thing that comes to mind is the idea of helplessness. It’s a trait I get to learn more about from the folks I hang around in Eastleigh who are apt to wear it like a declarative adolescent t-shirt such as “Bite me!” or  “You suck!”, but it’s also a trait I am discovering more and more to appreciate sharing with them. The group of minority tribe Somali men that I meet with once a week seems to have every right to broadcast their feelings of helplessness. They get targeted by majority tribe Somali aristocrats to be kidnapped and shipped to Somalia to fight for Al Shabaab, or else tortured and killed. After rushing to the hospital multiple times to have stab wounds patched up in the wake of narrowly escaping an attempted kidnapping, they should be displaying their feelings of helplessness. When they have to move their families from house to house to throw their attackers off their trail and cannot work for fear of being recognized, it is very appropriate that they proclaim their helplessness. Then finding that making multiple police reports and requests for investigations end in demands for a bribe they cannot afford to pay to get the protection they and their families desperately need – yep, helpless. 

My friend Nadine talks about how the value of being in a state of helplessness is that it can glaringly reveal the work that Jesus Christ is doing. I find that being around the helplessness of others reveals this, along with my own helplessness and vulnerability. This revelation not only makes the presence of Christ all the more glaring, but all the more tangible and desirable. I am daily convinced that any personal characteristic or skill that I possess to meet any of the needs I encounter is afforded me by a miraculously well placed birth, a more nutrient laden social environment than not, and a growing faith that has all been entirely gifted.

Despite owning all of this and feeling very well-outfitted for life this side of eternity, I am still just as helplessly vulnerable as the refugee who struggles to survive in Eastleigh. As one of the Kenya bishops recently pointed out at a World Refugee Day mass, we are all refugees if we consider our homeland to be in eternally, perpetual, and fully exposed proximity with the God who created us. Even our current access to this homeland through Christ is incomplete, a mere shadow, glimpse, and low quality pirated DVD picture of the land he will restore.  How very difficult it can be for someone like me to recognize this refugee status that I hold – and to be truly grateful for this daily bread of glimpsing the gospel message restore and re-create. I find that the contrast restoration and re-creation holds next to the desolation that surrounds me is provided by a position of exposure. Only the miraculous precedent of a present and living God allows me to experience this exposure with any transformative truth. Otherwise it is simply exposure.

To make a very long, drawn out thought into something inefficiently short: I find that Jesus Christ turns real ruin into real worship. And I’m really glad he does. I don’t like ruin and I can’t fake worship. Since I’m strangely drawn to ruin through social work and am discovering more about my own ruining, I’m easily filled with hurt and rage. Transformation is the most sustainable, most desirable treatment for these ailments in me, my “clients”, and the world that we share. I believe ruin draws me because where it is, transformation can be also.