Alfredo and I stood on the lawn, hosing down brown spots. “Do you want to come to my granddaughters’ birthday party on Saturday?” Alfredo asked me. He looked at me expectantly. “Yeah, sure, I think I can,” I fumbled. “I’ll let you know.”
Alfredo and I both work for a local landscaping company. For me, mowing lawns, raking leaves, and using those head-ringing, ear-splitting, gas-powered blowers is only a summer job. For him, it is how he keeps his family housed and fed. This is my third summer working with him, and we’ve generally got along in the past, but merely as co-workers. This past weekend, when Alfredo invited me to his home, to celebrate alongside him and the rest of his family, I became more than a co-worker. From the moment I arrived and he fed me loads of chorizo and ribs and other barbecued meat, to when his son said, “it looks like you’re part of the family now,” to when his daughter sent me home with a sack of avocados from their backyard, tupperwares filled with homemade salsa and guacamole, potato salad, a freezer bag filled with meat, and a chunk of birthday cake big enough to patch up a crumbling brick wall, I had the sense that I had not only become friends with Alfredo, but friends with his entire family.
My landscaping work this summer will be interrupted by another cross-cultural experience. On June 25th, our Global Urban Trek team will arrive in Thailand to live in a Bangkok slum for over a month. We will stay with a family, serve with the local church, and learn about urban poverty and what it means to do “incarnational” ministry. This term is taken from the Incarnation, the event in which God took on flesh and became human—Jesus’ birth. In the same way that God became like the people he wanted to reach, so incarnational missionaries become like the poor they want to reach. In what is essentially the textbook of the Global Urban Trek, Scott Bessenecker describes this missional incarnation as, “breaking out of the padding that separates and protects us from the harsh realities of poverty by embracing it voluntarily and stepping into relationship with the poor without the power dynamic that is normally present between the poor and nonpoor.”
All of this is a little abstract, and maybe even futile in some respects. Will any of us, college students in the States, become like Bangkok’s urban poor in a month? Can a US American ever totally incarnate and completely strip away the “padding” that separates them from someone else’s poverty? To me, the answer seems to be no; a missionary will never be shorn of his culture, his privilege, or his opportunity to get on a plane, go back to his home, and drop this voluntary poverty thing altogether. But I don’t want to sell incarnational ministry short. I haven’t even got on the plane to go. So one of my questions as I step off the plane onto Thailand’s soil will be how to flesh out this whole incarnation thing.
God spoke to me about this question this past weekend. In very few respects have I become like Alfredo. But in one respect—we work long, hot hours together in order to keep peoples’ yards beautiful—we share something. I didn’t take this job to do ministry. But as we shared time, stories, and thoughts, I began to wonder what God had for me in this job, and especially in the relationships I was developing.
Jesus was born in a dirty stable in order to offer us a friendship marked by self-sacrificing love. And he calls us to do the same—to find the uncomfortable places in the world and make friends there. One incarnation leads to more incarnations. This is what Alfredo’s invitation helped me to see. Because he was patient and open and because I had been willing to go to uncomfortable places with him—ten-hour workdays underneath the summer sun—we could break past the typical power dynamic between a Mexican-American gardener and a white college student. We shared gas trimmers, leaf piles, and tiredness. This sharing opened up the path to friendship.
As we touch down in Bangkok, we will be trying to discover what it means to pursue incarnation in order to reach the Thai people. Perhaps a first step will be realizing that before trying to “reach” them, we must first incarnate in order to open a path to friendship with them.
-Ryan Hammil
