Dealing With Mud and Contemplating Ministry

This morning we worked at the home of an elderly woman only a block or so from base camp. She lives in a very nice home, probably with several other family members. But she was home alone while we worked there today. Her home is probably about 300 meters from the waterfront wharf and apparently the entire first floor was flooded by the tsunami although you wouldn’t know it now. A lot of work has already been done to clean it up. And most of the yard looked pretty good too, but the little pond in the yard was still full of muddy sea water so we made a bucket brigade and spent about an hour emptying it and cleaning out the sludge and mud that had been deposited there on March 11th. Then we moved to the large ditch that runs between her home and the road. It’s a covered ditch about 1 meter deep and 1 meter wide with removable gratings every so often. It was clogged with mud, sand and gravel, all deposited by the waves. We crawled down into the sewer and cleaned it out one shovel load at a time. We wrapped up by about noon and headed back to camp to pack up our things and head home.

It was the first time for the three guys riding with me so we took the coastal route home, passing through the long list of towns and cities hit by the tsunami. We had lots of time to reflect on things as we drove and one point really caught my attention. The leader of our network, a pastor who lives and works in Morioka, a city about 60 miles from the coast, had recently mentioned the irony of doing this kind of relief work. We are continually amazing by the incredible opportunities to connect with people in really meaningful ways as we bring needed food and supplies to their door, play with traumatized little children in the evac centers, or dig the mud out of peoples homes and yards. These are people we’ve only just met and yet they often pour out their hearts to us. For a pastor these opportunities are almost too good to be true. And yet the irony is that here we are, doing all this in a town that doesn’t even have a church and none of us are likely to be able to plant one there in the near future. And yet back in the location where we do have churches, in some cases churches that have been there for decades, we almost never have these kinds of opportunities to connect with people outside the church on such a personal level.

On the one hand it just goes to show that unusual circumstances often lead to wonderful opportunities. But more importantly I think it’s a rude awaking for us. So much of what we do at church ends up being focussed on trying to get people to come… and yet it’s pretty clear in scripture that being the body of Christ is more about going to people than getting people to come to us. When our church programing revolves around trying to attract more new people to our church things seem to get bogged down pretty quickly. And yet when we find ourselves going out to where the people are, and where the needs are, we often find ourselves surprised by all the open doors. This isn’t anything new, but I still can’t help but wonder why it takes something as drastic as the worst tsunami in 1,000 years to get us to wake up and take note…