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| My House |
During our quiet time this morning I opened the book, Gospel (J.D. Greear), to the fifth chapter, the one on idolatry. It began, “What do you really feel like has to be present in your life for you to be happy? For life to be worth living? Maybe if you were really honest, you’d have to admit that it’s money. Or the acclaim of others. Or power. Or family. Friends, even church.”
Since I am translating this book with a radio script format, I have to make the text both personal and relevant to the Miskito-speaking audience. While idolatry and many idols themselves even (money, stuff, power, acclaim, family), are universal, that which makes the message resonate with the listener is not. Motifs and examples (What stuff? How family?) must be different here on the river than in the author’s milieu.
In an effort to tap into a personal emotion, I asked Nutie, “Can you think of a song that has a lyric like, “Jesus is all we need? One we sing in church?”
She started humming a tune segment: A song declaring we belong to Jesus/He’s all we need.
“Yeah, that one,” I said. “When I sing that I think, I need air, water, and food! I look around me. Do people know what they’re singing?”
Nutie went on to explain the principle, “Seek ye first the Kingdom and all those things will be added on,” and I got it, but still, if Jesus comes in a bundle, how do you know which comes first? You know, like the cable TV, the internet, or the phone service? And again, Nutie said life always provides an opportunity to prove to yourself who comes first, and again I got it, but maybe I just wanted to make things complicated.
“David came to faith at the same time we were secretly getting engaged,” she said, “It was hard for him to know—was it for Jesus or Nutie? But then, immediately afterward, a guy shows up and says that God had told him I was to be his wife. We were really young and it was confusing. But David decided that if it was true, he would have to let me go, and he did that. Of course the guy was misguided. But you see, God always gives us an opportunity to know.”
I thought about my life and everything I had either given up or lost. I reviewed the question in the book: “What do you really feel like has to be present in your life for you to be happy?” My life. My life needs to be present! I said, “Does that mean God will give me an opportunity to be a martyr?”
I always seem to take things to the extreme, but really, I need to know. Is my self-preservation instinct my idol?
I’m not crazy, I don’t have a death wish. I like my life.
There’s that song we sing, “Your lovingkindness is better than life.” God gave Dave and Nutie the opportunity to prove it to themselves. Many of their friends saw and came to faith in Jesus Christ at David’s death. But the opportunity God has given me is to love Nutie “as Christ loved the church, and gave Himself up for her”. I take small stabs at it; she serves me. She loves me so well, it’s almost too easy.
But there are daily opportunities here to be “poured out like a drink offering” (2 Thessalonians 4:6). Some are ill-advised, even scams, others are God-sent. People who can’t pay back. Hold that thought for a second.
If you want to know just how poor someone is, look at their shoes. Poor people all over the world know this. They go to great lengths to hide their poverty from the world because of the shame, or because they know that opportunities are much more likely to be open to those of substance, or at least those who appear to have substance. Shoes are more expensive than other articles of clothing, so great care is taken to make them look new and shiny. But they wear out before you can afford the next pair.
In 1982, when many Nicaraguan Miskitos became refugees in Honduras, I went to Washington D.C. One of the top rebel leaders was there, working at the Indian Law Resource Center. I went to see him. I was impressed; it was a nice office, and his large desk was the only one in the room. It was his office. He wore black dress pants and a long-sleeve Oxford shirt. We conversed. After a while, he relaxed and put his feet up on his desk. The sole of one of his well-polished shoes had a hole in it. So did his sock.
The shame among the poor attached to worn and broken shoes is probably what made Imelda Marcos’s ownership of more than 2,700 pairs of them such an egregious offense in the Philippines. It wasn’t just a rich person’s curious fetish. Today, 800 pairs of her shoes are on display at a museum in the city of Marikina, a kind of “Never Forget” testimony of the social cost associated with her idolatry.
So, asks the pharisee, how many pairs of shoes is legit? For most of my adult life in Central America, I consistently maintained a pair of rubber boots, black dress shoes, basketball shoes, and some cheap work boots that were usually too hot and too uncomfortable to wear unless it was totally necessary. Spin moves on concrete courts usually consumed the soles of my basketball shoes in three months, so I was constantly buying new Nike’s or Reebok’s. Some Christians said that basketball was my idol, and I no doubt scandalized many pious folk by playing shirtless on the outdoor court across the street from my church.
Since marrying Nutie, I have watched my collection of footwear grow steadily. Now, after giving away several pairs, my inventory includes: a pair of brown (Dockers) dress shoes (I left a black pair in the US), a pair of brown leather “relaxed-fit Sketcher shoes, state of the art rubber boots ($100 Muck Boots), mid-height hiking boots ($150 Teva’s I got for a heavy discount), running and basketball shoes (both Nike), Margaritaville cloth loafers, and two pairs of flip-flops. Oh, there’s also a pair of baseball cleats back in the States. Of course, each pair has a specific use, with the exception of the two flip-flops. I probably should give one away.
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| My Shoe Collection |
I finally decided to give the metal roof on our house a fresh coat of red paint the other day. The roof gets very hot, metal is slippery, the pitch is a 5, and the eaves are a good 30 feet off the ground. Nutie forbade me to go up there. I’m too old, she said.
“No, I can do it,” I protested.
She gave me a “I don’t want to lose a second husband” look. So, with a mixture of resignation and relief I asked my friend Abel to do it, violating my principle of never asking someone to do something I’m not willing to do myself. Abel, who just turned 30, got 16-year-old Orly to help him.
Miskito people are a courageous lot who think little of taking physical risks such as doing back flips into shallow water or riding on top of the oft-rolled bus from Managua, but there is something about working on a rooftop that spooks them. Perhaps it is because Father Hugo, a beloved priest from Wisconsin, fell 60 feet from the bell tower of the Iglesia San Rafael and burst on the concrete below. So I bought several lengths of rope and the one harness in stock at Isolina’s hardware store to tether them with. I wanted to be sure they felt safe.
I’m embarrassed to tell you how much I agreed to pay them. The going rate for a skilled laborer is $10 a day; I told Abel I would give him $13. “Hazard pay,” I said, gesturing toward the roof. An underage kid would normally be paid $4; I promised him $7, like a full-grown man in unskilled labor.
The next morning, Abel came to work in flip-flops, Orly in Crocks.
“I can’t have you go up there like that,” I said.
I went up to my closet and brought down my best gripping shoes—the hiking boots for Abel and basketball shoes for the boy. Nutie raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
Midmorning of the second day they descended and informed me that they were ready to start painting. They were working fast, like they were on contract, not day labor. They were getting after it. I noticed that Orly had on the Tevas, while Abel wore some beat-up sneakers that he must have had lying around. At five, when they knocked off, they had covered at least a third of the roof. Okay, I thought. Good. When I had originally negotiated with Abel, I had calculated that they would probably finish the job in 4 days under contract, 6 under day labor.
“If you finish tomorrow, I’ll pay you both for four days,” I said.
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| Orly |
The next day they arrived at six in the morning and climbed the extension ladder to the water tank, then scaled to the roof via the step ladder lashed to the tank. They took a brief lunch, returned, and then at five thirty I heard the sound of the extension ladder being retracted. I went out and saw them cleaning the brushes. Orly was barefoot, my hiking boots on the steps. They were not red when I had bought them.
“You two look like you’ve been dirt biking on Mars,” I said. “Where’s my Nikes?”
Orly pointed to the door of the bodega.
The first floor of our house is like a garage—a large storage space where we keep things like tools, bicycles, and paint. I found my Nikes laying on the floor with the soles detached, picked them up, and carried them outside.
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| Abel |
Abel turned to his helper. “I told you so.”
Orly’s downcast face was like the beginning of a gospel story. Suddenly, I understood that it was up to me to complete it. Was a couple of pairs of shoes worth more to me than a young man’s life and safety? I handed the Tevas back to Orly. “You need to wash them before you return them,” I said, and left it at that.
Even though the dress code for preachers is pretty strict around here, I’ve worn my hiking boots to church on occasion and gotten away with it. Now, people would think them inappropriate for “holy use”. But when I see them all speckled red, they look to me like they have been sprinkled with the blood of Jesus.
The Bible never makes mention of the Apostle Peter’s father-in-law, but it was the roof of his house that people took apart to drop a paralytic at Jesus’s feet. Have you ever wondered how you would have handled it?
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For shoes, put on the peace that comes from the Good News so that you will be fully prepared. —Ephesians 6:16 (NLT)
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