Today I was defeated. I came to a point when no words could portray the cries of my heart. I saw the unimaginable destruction of apathy. We went to pick up trash in the slums and I can only say that what I experienced horrified me. There was a nauseating smell of dead fish and human feces. There were huge mounds of trash, human waste and rotting bones; so much so that we had to use rakes because picking up trash with our hands was almost useless. Amongst the trash, there was human poop (among other animal remains) lying on the ground, some of it was put into plastic bags and thrown into the trash pile. There were used condoms everywhere; more tragically there was a pile of unopened packages that I picked up with one hand and with the other hand I picked up a used plastic produce bag that had been used as a condom. They just don’t know and because they don’t know, they don’t’ care. The trash was gathered into piles and was burned, sending up toxic fumes into the air only adding to the already deadly smell of rotting waste. I suppose that one might grow accustomed to the smell, but that doesn’t make it ok; it doesn’t make the smell disappear. In the midst of all this waste, there was a tiny kitten. She was dirty, her eyes couldn’t open, she could barely walk and when I picked her up, all that was there were her bones. She was dying and she had been abandoned and forgotten; let’s call her the church. We took her to some of the local ladies to see if they recognized her or could take care of her, but they laughed at us and told us that she belonged in the rubbish; they couldn’t even afford to give her any scraps. She was nothing to them. As I held her in my hands, I could feel her battle to breathe; she had been thrown away and left to die without a chance. I looked down at her and I was completely defeated. We found some milk for her to drink but even if we fed her, it would only give her another day to live abandoned with no hope to survive. We fed her some milk and lay her down in a pile of sand which would most likely be her grave because there was nothing else that we could do. Tears couldn’t hold back and I just sat there and thought about the people that live in this community; how this is their life. This is the life that they are born into. They have become accustomed to it and with this contentment comes the loss of any motivation to find any hope of a life worth living for. They have fallen into a spirit of apathy where nothing, not even their own lives have any meaning or purpose. They live in this contentment and abuse their bodies, the people around them, the environment because there is no purpose big enough to preserve any of it. They don’t have time, energy or worse the knowledge to think that there is anything more to life than just surviving. They don’t know any better and they havn’t been given the chance to see that their lives are worth something. They have been thrown out and left to die just as the kitten was. This is not ok and I find myself just wanting to scream, Jesus why does it have to be this way, its not fair, its not right. What can I possibly do because I know by my own power there is very little that I can do? The only thing we really can do is pray; pray for hearts, pray for revival, pray for anything to bring hope and change. But I know that the one thing I can’t do is let myself become defeated because God is bigger than this and I have to trust that He is working in this. Its all we really have if you think about it.
