Recently the newspaper reported
on a poll concerning the two final candidates for the presidency
who will face each other in a second round of voting on December
28. These two appear to be the most honest and respected of the
many who first threw their hats in the ring, certainly ranking
well above Rios Montt, the widely feared and despised former dictator
defeated in the first round. One question was about which of the
candidates do you see as a liar? Some 54 percent name one or the
other, while 46 percent say they’re not sure or don’t
respond.
Amidst this prevailing distrust, where do we find the hope that
calls us to keep working, to keep building, to find God in the
midst of this part of God’s church and world? With enormous
challenges of poverty and oppression, high levels of unemployment,
illiteracy, malnutrition and crime in the society; with a church
struggling to stay alive with underpaid or unpaid clergy, many
with no more than an elementary or high-school education. Where
is the hope? Where is the Spirit of God moving? How do we connect?
Women are taking advantage of every opportunity to gain education.
Hundreds are taking literacy classes, attending workshops, seminars,
and conferences on topics such as church polity, Bible and theology,
domestic abuse, self-care and gaining greater self-esteem.
When a Young Adult Volunteer was hospitalized last year to fight
intestinal parasites, the whole session from her Guatemalan church
(among many others) came to visit her. They had to take buses
and ride in the backs of pickups to get there, but get there they
did in order to bear witness to the hope that sustains them in
their lives and in their faiths.
A U.S. church group spent a week working in an isolated community,
climbing an hour daily up a mountain trail, surprising all in
the community when they showed up the first time, even more the
second, and having developed real confidence by the fourth and
fifth, to seal that trust when several returned in October to
sign a covenant with the presbytery and the next day again climbed
the trail to visit their new-found brothers and sisters on the
mountainside, to worship and to eat together.
Hope, a gift from God, offered to us in the words of Scripture,
in the examples of the lives of Jesus, the prophets, in the poetry
of the psalms, and in the witness of faithful Guatemalan Presbyterian
Christians with whom we have the privilege of working. Trust,
a gift that cannot be accepted lightly and can so easily be lost.
And yes, there is risk. If trust is to develop, some must be willing
to take the first step, knowing it may be misunderstood. But,
it must begin with someone.
It did begin with someone! We proclaim this project has already
begun with the promises and the actions of a God who delivers
God’s people from bondage, by a God who doesn’t sit
in judgment, but sent a child to preach and teach and demonstrate
love, forgiveness, liberation, and trust to people who, like ourselves,
did not deserve it and did not live up to it, but were made better
because of it.
This Advent season we join the Presbyterians in Guatemala in
waiting expectantly and hopefully for the Lord, for the gracious
promise God has given, to do what is “just and right in
the land.” We join in preparation to sing with Mary, “My
soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,”
and with Zechariah, “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel,
because he has come and has redeemed his people.”
Grace and peace,
Selena and Joe Keesecker
The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
133
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