What Do YOung Suburban American Christians Have to Teach Third World Earthquake Victims?

We arrived in Peru about 6 in the morning on a Sunday and slept for a couple of hours before visiting the churches we would be working with. In the evening, there was a service at Pastor D's church. A group of Americans on an eleven month mission trip around the world had been camped out in the church yard for a couple of weeks and had been helping with vacation Bible school and other projects. This group, comprised mainly of twenty-somethings, helped lead the service.

I have to tell you that I cringed when Sister Tammy shared from one of Paul's letters about how Christians shouldn't complain or argue. She had been complaining it seems about how the chicken poop in the washing water had not helped with her hair care regimen and that she had been bitten a lot by bugs. She had asked God to help her and He had used the wind to open her Bible to the verse about complaining and arguing. Good grief! She was, it seemed to me, comparing her voluntarily undertaken minor inconveniences with the plight of the earthquake victims! And as far as I could tell, they weren't the ones who had been complaining, although we might have cut them some slack if they had been.

A young man got up and shared about how Paul considered his hardships a temporary matter and that we should all look forward to sweet, sweet death when the inconveniences of earthquakes having destroyed one's town will no longer pertain. That's easy for Mr SuburbanAmericanWhoNeverMissedAMeal to say. All he cares about is souls and their fate in the afterlife, and it is a great comfort, at least to him, that he doesn't need to worry much about the suffering of others in this world as long as he had helped lead them to the Lord.

The arrogance of these twenty-somethings was almost unbearable. Frankly, they were really there to learn and to develop, and I doubt that any of them had a right to consider himself or herself the spiritual superior of anyone in Chincha. Maybe at the end of the journey they will have learned humility and will cringe when they think of how they were at the beginning. Under the circumstances, they ought not to have been called upon to teach or preach.