Favorite Words
“What were you born for? Infitite happiness of course. You can step into it at any time.”
Inspiration Live: Ron Hockley Speaker, Motivator.
La Chureca
Close your eyes and imagine an ancient burial ground used for decades as a smoldering catch-all for the stinking garbage of a million people. It’s a place reminiscent of Gehenna, the biblical hell, and Dante’s inferno: a place that feels dark even when the hot sun blazes through the greasy smoke and swirling vultures; a dead place that reeks of fear, injustice and wretchedness.
The place is La Chureca, Spanish for The Dump. It’s a real place that more than 1,200 people call home. Sometimes they move like phantoms with hollow eyes ~ dead people walking. But other times life surprises you like a jack-in-the-box: in the laughing face of a child with perfect teeth, in the antics of a litter of tiny piglets rooting in the trash, in the strangely glad singing of boys and girls with no address except The Dump.
If you took a leisurely walk through La Chureca you might meet Josephine and Alexander, Sylvia, Gloria & Maria. You might be invited into one of their thatch and trash hovels. You might see fear or sadness or hope in their eyes. You could visit the grade school called Hope, scratched into the heart of the dump, where about 350 kids are provided a free lunch and education.
Last year we had an idea for a wonderful, life-giving new church to burst out in the Chureca, building on the spiritual beachhead of the school; a church where hundreds of people would experience hope, healing and redemption through Christ.
The first chapter of Colossians says that God rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of his Son, the kingdom of light. We are now part of extending that rescue operation into La Chureca.