Slaughtered Sheep

I have a friend who owns a farm out in Pomaria, a very small town outside of Columbia.  One day he got a call from a family asking to buy a sheep.  Skeptical to sell one of his sheep to a stranger, but forever the optimist, he invited the family out to his farm.  The family came, bought the sheep, and asked him if they could have a bucket of water and have a picnic under one of the big trees on the property that afternoon. He agreed and watched a ritual he had never seen before.  

The family prayed over the sheep and calmed it down with their soothing voices.  They slowly revealed a blade and slit the sheep’s throat, allowing the blood to run onto the ground.  When the blood was drained from the sheep’s body, it was skinned, and cut apart so that every single part of the sheep could be used for various things - the skin, bones, stomach - it was all packed away for the family to use later.  They stayed for hours, making sure that every piece of sheep would have a purpose.  When my friend later walked out to the place under the tree where the sheep had been slaughtered, he was surprised to find that there was barely any trace of the sheep left - just a little blood on the grass.  

As my friend told me this story, I asked him, “weren’t you upset that they slaughtered one of your sheep?”  He shrugged and said, “It wasn’t my sheep.  The sheep belonged to them and they can use it however they want to use it. I’m just glad they used the whole thing. Nothing went to waste.”  

When I think about that family and that sheep, I think about all of the parts of an animal that I would have absolutely no use for.  What do you do with the eyes? The horns? The hooves?  Even if you are able to eat most of the meat of the sheep, what are you going to do with the intestines? The bones?  

But the sheep was precious to these people.  They knew the great wealth in using every part of the sheep.  They understood what it meant to own something and use the entire thing.  

The shepherds of Jesus’ time understood this too.  The sheep belonged to the shepherd so the shepherd was able to use the sheep in whatever way he chose.  The shepherd recognized that every single part of the sheep was precious.  Some parts we would expect - bones being made into sewing needles - but some parts being considered so diligently and uniquely - the stomach sew to carry water.  

Nothing was wasted because the shepherd knew that each sheep was precious and worth being used.  He also simply couldn’t afford to waste any part of the sheep.

When the sheep are all you have to secure the future of your family, you are very careful and particular about how you use the sheep.  Without an abundance of healthy sheep, the shepherd would risk the wellbeing of his family.  Without their sheep they would have no livelihood.   

Just as we invest in our future and our family’s future with stocks, bonds, retirements funds, real estate and life insurance, shepherds invested in the future of their family by nurturing a large, healthy flock.  A growing flock meant a future, an inheritance, for the shepherd’s offspring.  

So when we understand how much the flock means to the shepherd, it is no surprise that a good shepherd would lay down his life for his sheep. He is not only protecting his pets or his income, but his future and his family’s future. 

In this passage, Jesus makes a promise to his people, his flock.  He commits his life to the wellbeing of the sheep, he declares that he will do everything it takes to protect them, keep them safe - even to the point to death.  What he is promising is a future - an inheritance for his family. 

But we are not only the inheritors of the sheep - the inheritors of the wool, blankets, and meat that came from the sheep.  Jesus says that we are the sheep.  We are the ones that will be slaughtered and used at the will of the shepherd to whom we belong.  And the crazy part is that God is using not just the good parts, not just our gifts, but also our faults, our failures, our sins for God’s purposes.  God wants all of us - every piece of skin, bone, and stomach - leaving nothing unused.  

I read a news article this week about a new first person video game.  It’s called Outcasted and in the game, the player is posed as a homeless person begging for change in a random location.  There are no levels, no achievements.  The only way you are able to interact with another character is to hold their eye contact, hold out your hand, and ask for money.  The makers of the game hope that it will help people better empathize with the monotony and despair that homeless people feel on a daily basis.  And it has worked.  It is changing the way people walk through their lives, making them think twice about ignoring the man sitting outside the grocery store every afternoon. 

God is using everything - even the weird stuff.  Not just the improved parts of us or the successful parts of us.  Not just our great singing voices or our steady hands.  God is using our quick tempers and our low self esteem.  God is using our deep rooted prejudices and our crumbling marriages.  God can and will use every part of us for God’s purposes.  And sometimes that involves what feels like to be slaughtered.  

Jesus never tells us that we will be shielded from potential danger in the pasture.  He never says that he won’t lead us to the edge of a cliff or into the midst of wolves. But what he does say is that he will gather us in, keep us together.  He will come after us when we stray.  He says that when the wolves come to prey on us - and they will - that he will lay down his life to protect us.  Because we are part of the flock, we can trust that when the Spirit leads us to frightening places, uncomfortable places, Christ is with us.  His voice calls our names and comforts us.  We are protected and provided for.  

Miss Martha is about four foot nine.  She is a tiny, fierce lady in her late sixties. Miss Martha is unemployed.  She lives in a small one-bedroom house in a run down part of the neighborhood with her tiny dog Miko.  She has two industrial sized freezers that stay stocked with chickens, ground beef, and an assortment of vegetables.  Her garage is packed with rice, beans, bread, and anything else a family could want for - “only the healthy stuff,” she tells you with a knowing nod.  

Miss Martha is unemployed, but she is not jobless. Miss Martha feeds all of the hungry families in her neighborhood.  And in that neighborhood, there are more than a few hungry families.  She recognizes her call to be a mother to all, a provider, a nurturing hand and kind heart.  “My call comes from God,” she says, “and my ability to do my call comes from God.”  

Miss Martha makes absolutely no money doing what she does. She is only able to give because of the generosity God has put in the hearts of the people around her.  Several times a week, church members, high schoolers, businesspeople will come through the gate of her chain link fence bearing gifts - bags of food for the neighbors, carts of frozen food, and checks for Miss Martha’s electricity or water. 

I once asked Miss Martha if she ever got worried that she would run out of food for the neighborhood or money to pay her electric bill.  She smiled and said, “Oh no. God made a promise that God would provide. You believe that, you don’t ever have to worry.”  

Miss Martha recognizes that she was being called by God to an uncomfortable, challenging, holy place.  She has faith that God will provide her with everything she needs and in her faith she has the freedom to let herself be used by God.  And God uses her to do God’s will - God uses every part of Miss Martha, the good and the bad, her mistakes and her passion.  Even in the moments of most discomfort - when she receives a late notice on her bill - when she cannot afford to buy food - she trusts in God’s provision.  

Many of us do not have the same trust in God that Miss Martha has.  It is why we cling so tightly to the image of Christ’s hesitation in the garden.  Yes! We know what that feels like.  Yet the cross is so mind-boggling to us.  We cannot wrap our heads around that kind of faith.  Jesus had faith in God that God would provide.  He was able to go to the slaughter with a calm heart and steady hand because he had faith in the resurrection.  He knew that he belonged to God and would be used according to God’s will.  

It is the great paradox of our faith.  In order to follow God, we will be led by the Spirit to uncomfortable places, places that often times look like the cross of Christ.  We are led to these places by the same God that promises to keep us safe, to redeem us and the entire world.  And it is in those uncomfortable places that God most clearly reveals God’s redemptive power.  

Having the faith to be led to these challenging, holy places is what the kingdom of God looks like.  Dwelling in the uneasiness of being slaughtered will change our lives. It will challenge us to shake hands, hug, and sincerely say “peace be with you” to the man who mugged you at the grocery store.  It will challenge us to approach the same communion rail with a person who has abused her spouse or his child.  It will bring us to share a hymnal with the outspoken racist.  It will give us the freedom to lay down our lives for one another so that they might live, so that there might be an inheritance and a future for the ones who come after us.  

From Yvon to home

We spent the majority of our time in Yvon working on a large church at the bottom of a hill.  It was a beautiful work of cement art, big enough for over 200 people.  

The other time was spent exploring the beautiful hills surrounding the village and spending time with the kids in the area.  If children can afford to go to the school in the village, they learn French, English, Creole, and Spanish.  We were better able to communicate with many of the children than the adults who had been out of school for many years.  I spoke the tiny bit of French I know, but immediately had better success with English.  The little girls giggled and asked shyly to take the coloring books while the young men asked how to translate things into English.  “How do you say…?” became a favorite phrase between us and the children.  

Every night we slowly made our way back up the mountain, exhausted from the sunshine and work.  We ate all of our meals in the old church that overlooks a huge beautiful lake.  We mostly had rice and beans with fried plantains and chicken.  After dinner we pulled out boxes of dominos and turned on the generator, which powered the lights on the porch, in the kitchen, and one bulb in the church.  About thirty people from all over the village came to play cards and dominos or laugh and sing church songs with us.   

Some days we walked down to the well to help people pump water into five gallon bottles or buckets so they could take it home or bathe in the shadows of the palm trees.  It was difficult work.  The long metal pole to pump the water took almost all of my body weight before a tiny bit of water squirted out.  The well was where everyone gathered at least four times a day.  Even the smallest children pulled and poked their donkeys to the well to gather water for their families.

We talked a lot about the earthquake within our group but we were too afraid  to ask too much from the people in the community.  We weren’t sure if they or their families were directly affected by it or how they would react to our questions.  We finally found  enough courage to ask one of our translators Napoleon and were struck by his story. 

He was in the university at the time, studying to be a translator as it is one of the few semi-guaranteed jobs in the country due to the mission trips that have been more and more frequent in the past five years.  Napoleon was running late the morning of the earthquake.  He said he was walking to the university when he felt the ground move beneath him and the walls around him start to crumble.  He laid flat on the ground and thought to himself, “this is the end, I will die here.”  As the quakes and the aftershock stopped, he continued his walk to the university.  What he saw was complete devastation.  The entire four story building collapsed, killing over 200 students and more than a dozen professors.  

Napoleon said that it was much worse for people who were in school or had jobs - they were the ones inside the buildings when they collapsed that day.  He hesitantly told us about his cousins who worked on the first floor of a hotel.  The entire building fell upon them.  

On the last day of our trip we drove over five hours to one of the memorials, honoring the lives of thousands of people who died in the earthquake.  The memorial was at the sight of a mass grave where bodies were piled into a hole by a dumpster after the quake.  

It was eerie and devastating.  There was a deafening silence - anyone who may have lived near the area has long since left due to superstition and respect.  Over the walls we could see the city of Soleil (the poorest city in Haiti) with clouds of ash coming from the communes where they burned piles of trash.  We sat at the memorial for  several minutes, each of us praying or meditating, remembering in our own ways.  

We flew home the next day after spending a long time in the Haitian airport.  I haven’t been able to write much about Haiti since that day until I sat down to write this.  For a long time I have prayed a devastating prayer: “Lord, break my heart for the things that break your heart. Ruin me for the ordinary and for the easy.”  God has answered my prayers in this trip. 

I want to learn to live in a way that empowers others instead of treading on them.  I want to learn to enable them and help them identify their gifts and calling in this world.  I wish to be a leader who is able to follow, one who leads with gentleness and kindness as well as justice.  I wish to seek the assets of communities and peoples instead of first noticing the weaknesses.  I hope to find redemption and grace in all situations and experiences.  I hope that God will continue to ruin me for the cultural norms and the things that society thinks are natural.  I hope to follow Christ in all my actions and do God’s will - especially when it leads me to new places and makes me feel uncomfortable.  

So, you might be asking (as I am), what is next?  What can we do for a country that takes our aid and sells it for profit?  What can we do for a country that continues to take handouts because they are readily available and jobs are not. 

One thing we are able to do right away is change our thought process.  We must think in terms of what we can do with Haiti instead of for Haiti.  We must partner with the government and aid organizations that are already in Haiti and accountable.  We must look for the strengths within Haiti and throughout the Haitian people instead of focusing on their weaknesses. 

We can also work with churches within Haiti who are accountable to help put money into the Haitian economy.  Although there is a lot of literature about how harmful short term missions are for countries, when done correctly they pour thousands of dollars into the country’s economy and encourage people to care about foreign countries.  Our mission trip gave over $3,200 for the new church and to pay the workers and translators that stayed with us that week.  That money will not go to corrupt government officials or unaccountable aid organizations.  It will go directly back into the Haitian economy.  

We can also pray.  Although it sounds benign considering the pain and heartbreak in Haiti, we know that God is able to do incredible things.  We have no knowledge of what God might do through pray and what God has already done through the churches in Haiti.    

From Port-au-Prince to Yvon

I won’t tell you it was life-changing. It is far too easy to go back to living my normal, Westernized,  previous life in South Carolina.  It is much more difficult to change.  In fact, I am already back to my normal routine - only to be intermittently interrupted by people asking how the mission trip went.  I have not sold all of my things and I am not running to the pulpit to preach about the devastation in Haiti. 

But now I have seen it - the children and mothers begging for food, the charity from hundreds of foreign countries being auctioned on the streets.  I may not be changed, but I am not the same.  

One of the most stunningly tragic parts of the trip was the ride from Port-au-Prince to Yvon.  We left early that morning and packed into a very small bus for the ten of us and all of our luggage.  As we pulled out of the Methodist guest house compound, it became obvious that I would not be going back to sleep for the four hour ride.  

I was jostled by the symphony of honks and brakes and engines revving at the next intersection.  I was taken by the sights and the sounds all around me.  It was like nothing I had ever seen before.  I was sure that the bus driver had purposely gone through a more depressed part of the city in order to “show these North Americans how good they have it.”  But as we continued down the maze of streets, I realized that every street was the exact same.  All the vibrant colors on the walls of the city were muted by a layer of dust.

There were huge hogs in the drainage canals which were no longer draining anything due to the amount of human and animal waste piled high within them.  There was an obvious difference between the women in the streets.  In Haiti, if you get pregnant you are kicked out of school.  The young women who make it through school and are lucky enough to find a job have a visible sense of independence and pride - something that was very obvious in our translator Angee.  

As we got out of the city, I thought I would get the chance to relax my muscles and take a nap.  We rounded a corner and saw trash piled high, burning.  As we passed our group coughed and  covered our eyes.  It stung my eyes and nose and gave me a deep sense in my gut that I was not going to get any sleep on this trip.  

We passed half-complete construction sites from past service projects and empty promises.  In many places in Haiti, people will build until they run out of money and cannot build anymore.  There is no financing, no hope of asking for a loan for a new house.  Many times, houses are left half-finished with long poles of rebar sticking high into the air.  

As we continued, I started to understand the language of the car horns - the long drawn out of “I’m coming over” or the short burst to villagers of “don’t cross the street” or the tap-tap of “thank you” after passing.  My favorite was the screeching warning to cars as we flew around sharp corners at nearly 80 miles per hour.  (There are no speed limits in this part of Haiti.) 

The glimpse of the ocean between the crumbling walls helped us forget where we were for a brief second.  It is stunningly blue and tranquil outside of the dirt and chaos of the city.  Until you see the specks of people fishing - realizing that their labor is not for pleasure but survival.  

After about two hours of travel we have become accustomed to the rotting or dead animals on the side of the road.  The gusts of sewage washing over you starts to be familiar.  The houses became less  structurally sound as we moved further and further from the city.  They were made out of whatever people could buy, find, or trade - tin, mud, and palm branches. 

We slowly passed by a large market that took up almost the entire street.  Men reached into the open windows of the van trying to sell us bread, water, and sodas in glass bottles.  Others were selling school supplies, diapers, toothpaste, and soap by the box.  I felt a fire rising in my chest like heartburn as I realized that relief from foreign countries and missions were not going to people in need but instead being auctioned off to the highest bidder.  

We continued down the narrow road and as I thought, “surely we will run out of island soon and drive right into the ocean,” we turned onto a dirt road toward the village of Yvon.