🚀 go-pugleaf

[Our urban-missionary-daughter Lindy's testimony. Challenging! Rowland and
Jan Croucher].

Equal at the foot of the cross

Lindy Croucher

If I had come across the missionary organization Urban Neighbours of Hope
and a commitment to poverty as a twenty-year-old, it would have seemed weird
and extreme to me. I was private schooled, middle class, and very actively
involved in my monocultural eastern suburbs church [in Melbourne]. But one
night I went home from church and opened my Bible to 1 John 3:17-18 and out
of nowhere this verse suddenly shook me up. It said, "How does God's love
abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in
need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or
speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from
the truth and will reassure our hearts before him."

I thought, "I rarely actually see the poor. It's like society is structured
to shield me from that discomfort. But if I'm honest I know there are
desperate needs even here in my own backyard."

That night I was convicted that in my comfortable ignorance I was as guilty
as the rich man in Jesus' parable of Lazarus. We're not told that he
consciously and deliberately ignored the poor man at his gate. He had just
never stopped to consider that it might have been his responsibility to do
something about Lazarus' situation. And according to Jesus the implications
were eternal!

Like the rich man in the parable I knew the poor were out there, but I
hadn't
really responded to the call of Jesus to leave my comfort and security
behind and follow him in living out a gospel that is good news for the poor.

That week I approached Youth For Christ, who linked me in with a worker
visiting women - in  prison. Prison! The last place on earth I ever expected
to find myself! I probably never watched more than one episode of Prisoner,
but I expected everyone in prison to be just like that main character
Bea-butch, crass and very intimidating! I really doubted that I would find
any common ground with these women, and was sure they would quickly write me
off with the same assumption. But I was in for a surprise. The amazing
discovery for me was that people facing issues of poverty, and even those
who end up in jail, are really no different to you or me. Those women became
my friends and my sisters. They welcomed me, entertained me, inspired me and
affirmed me, and together we grappled with life's biggest questions.

One moment in a prison chapel service, especially stands out...

The silence in the small, crowded prison chapel was electrifying. Tears
streamed down my face as I held the hand of "Dee", a young Maori woman who
sat beside me, sobbing. For a short time, in this small oasis of peace, the
code of prison culture-never to show your weakness-was forgotten, as most
women let their tears flow. Finally, one woman broke the silence. "Could you
please sing it again?" Ja McNeill, our visiting muso, had written what he
imagined God speaking into his darkest hour. To me, in those few moments,
God reached into a meeting of the broken-hearted, to give a special gift to
those closest to his heart.

It's in the morning

I know you don't want another day

It's a hard life

I don't want you to feel this way

I caught Heather's eye and saw that she was far too strung out to cry. "Hope
deferred makes the heart sick." (Proverbs 13:12). Heather was a loving "mum"
to many women, myself included, and we all felt with her the strain of
waiting, day after day, for the outcome of her latest appeal. Would she, the
survivor of fourteen years of her husband's torture, be acquitted or face
another eight years of painful separation from loved ones?

I've seen your tears fall

In the silence of the night

I've watched you stare at

The darkest part of life

Some of the women were crying for Dee. She had just made the agonizing
decision to send her 8-year-old son to the only people she trusted to care
for him-in Queensland. They had always weathered life's storms together, but
this decision meant a whole six months before her little boy would be
reunited with the only significant adult in his life.

I will carry you now

I will carry the pain

I will carry the weight

That makes days the same

I looked around the other faces in the room, knowing fragments of their
stories, realizing the immensity of untold pain. I had visited the prison
many times-running programs, building friendships-but often wondered, "Who
am I to connect with these women? How can I begin to understand what their
lives have held?"

As I search your soul

I'll bring hope and you'll know

I will love you through this day

In that one hour I knew my calling. It was a simple experience of being
together - feeling each other's pain and experiencing the reality of God's
grace. The message of another chapel service came back to me. "We've all
been treated like crap, and we've all treated others like crap. We all need
to be healed, and we all need to be forgiven." This was the truth that was
setting me free - that we are all broken and stand in need of God's grace,
and in need of each other. We are called to be vulnerable, and to risk
getting hurt. But a mystery was unfolding for me - that as we open our
hearts and lives to others, and dare to enter their pain, as well as our
own, we most truly encounter the Christ, who entered our pain and chaos, and
brought light to our darkness, and good news to the poor.

A precious candle

In the wind of life

Dancing to live

Dancing in the night

I'm beginning to understand, from years of visiting women in prison, and now
several years sharing life in UNOH's Springvale and Noble Park communities,
that poverty has many, many faces. I now see heroin addicts and asylum
seekers, elderly people who are desperately lonely and kids who are
neglected, single parents battling enormous odds, and people, so many of
them, suffering mental health issues. And behind every face is a real
person, with feelings, and fears, kids they adore, and hopes for the future.
All are trapped in different kinds of poverty, made powerless by diminished
access to inner and outer resources. We live in a world crying out for any
sign that someone cares. Jesus said in Matthew 25 that when we respond to
the needs of the poor, we are responding to him. It is as we reach out that
God's love becomes real in us, and we begin to experience life - in
abundance!

February 2005

--
                                                               *
Shalom!   Rowland Croucher
                                                           *       *
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/                               *
(14300+ articles, 3100 clean jokes/stories, 1.5 m. hits/month)
Internet Evangelism Conference    http://ie-21stcentury.com/
                                                              *