Divine Recycling

by Global Ministries | published on Oct 10, 2014

Not long ago I visited the City of Concepción, the area of town near where the Bio Bio River, one of the largest rivers in Chile, flows into the Pacific Ocean. It is a beautiful place with a new avenue following the curves of the banks and a river walk jeweled with green parks, newly planted trees and spaces for picnics near modern playgrounds. From the tiny apartment overlooking the river, I can hear an occasional boat whistle punctuating the bubbling noise of families out enjoying the spring weather. How this community has changed since I first visited nearly ten years ago.

Elena Huegel – Chile

Back then, it was a neighborhood of despair, the land of the poorest of the poor. Originally, it had been a squatter’s community where homeless people coming into the city looking for jobs banded together to put roofs over their heads. They used tin, wood, cardboard or whatever else they could find in the dump to build a makeshift shanty on abandoned government property. When the government tried to eject them from the land, they refused to leave, contacted the press and managed to hold onto these homes they had eked out of nothing. Whenever the river flooded beyond its banks, it washed away the makeshift houses. When the water receded, the people kept coming back.

There still aren’t enough jobs in Concepción, Chile’s second largest city. Back then, unemployment was even higher. Violence was never far from the front door. The week I visited, a murdered body was found on a street corner. No one knew who the person was, and the police dared not enter the area until the following day. The body lay in the street overnight; no one dared to touch it for fear of getting involved. The dreaded Hanta virus ran rampant here, fed by the poverty and the rats. Mothers had to guard their babies in their cradles for fear that a rat might run through the room leaving a trail of death. Even the dust where the rats have been can bear the deadly disease.

During the visit, I had been told that the government had determined that the whole barrio would be torn down in a year to two to rid the community of vermin and disease. The people speculated about what would happen to them. They suspected that those who had enough money would be able to live on the same land in brand new government-built housing. Most people with enough money would never have chosen to live in the población in the first place. Would the people who didn’t have the money be out on the streets? This tiny apartment with running water and cheery curtains that overlooks the banks of the Bio-Bio belongs to a family who lived in a cardboard walled and tin roofed shack. They are long time members of the Pentecostal Church of Chile. With laughter and tears, mixed by the still fresh amazement of the radical changes that have come over their neighborhood, they speak of the slow, but steady, transformation from the dark fear of streets run by drug lords to kites, bikes, and soccer games. I remembered a story told to me by two women from Massachusetts who visited the church and stayed in this community for a week.

“It was Sunday morning and the church school recitation and songs had ended. It was about time to go home, but a hush descended over the congregation. We knew something important was about to happen. A man who sat in the back o f the church began to speak. He spoke sitting in his pew, as if he were not worthy to come forward. His face was young, but his bearing was like an old man, as if he had seen too much of life already. He told his story through a translator, and some of what he said was not translatable, but this is what I heard:

‘I was a bad man. When I was in prison, I was the worst of the worst. If I pointed to a man and said, “Die,” then someone from my gang would do the dirty work. I was the one who decided who would live and who would die. I was the leader because I was the toughest. I didn’t care about anyone, not even myself. I had no softness in my heart.

Toward the end of my sentence, I got into a knife fight with the head of the other gang in prison. I had 17 stab wounds, any one of which could have killed me. As I lay in the murky place between life and death, and angel appeared to me. She told me, “Stop living this life. Turn away from it and live a new life.” When I became conscious again, the hospital, the doctors and the prisons didn’t seem real anymore. Only the angel was real. So I changed my life and became a new man.

Today, I collect trash: the rubbish that others have thrown out, those things that are discarded, of no use to anyone. I find something of value in them. I make art from them.’

This brother named Ricardo stood up and opened a bag. Out of it, he pulled a beautifully painted and carved mask, fashioned from a discarded pipe. In the one face of the mask were three faces. Ricardo said: ‘See, in this rubbish is the face of God. When I was trash, thrown away, of no use to anyone, God saw something of value in me and salvaged me, and so I do this for my job…to be a witness and to thank God.’

Those women from Massachusetts were given a glimpse into a vision of something that had not yet happened. One of them wrote, “Then I knew the neighborhood of despair was really a neighborhood of hope. People came to this modest, little church and discovered something of value in themselves and each other. They gave testimonies, sang songs, cried rivers of tears, all the while laughing and clapping with the joy of it all. Something extraordinary had happened that day. I had laid eyes on the face of the living Christ still among us, alive, active and powerful.”

And now I was here in the place of that vision fulfilled. The tiny congregation that was a light in the middle of the darkness continues to be a beacon of God’s life giving power. I have heard that Ricardo is now in charge of an art museum. Like Ricardo, the whole community has been transformed and the church has been one of God’s tools. God makes no garbage but takes the trash in our lives and works it over until we are molded into the masterpieces God intended, unique reflections of God’s very self. Our God is, after all, the garbage collecting master of recycled art.

Elena Huegel

Elena Huegel is a missionary with the Pentecostal Church of Chile (IPC). She serves as an environmental and Christian education specialist.