Heart Tracks - Living In Garbage City

     Nick Vujicic, a 32 year old man born without legs or arms, in his book, Life Without Limits, tells the story of ministering in Cairo, Egypt at a place known as Garbage City.  It was the city's worst slum, built up against towering cliffs.  Nearly 50,000 people live there.  Egypt is a nation that is 90% Muslim, yet the population of Garbage City is 98% Christian.  They are outcasts to those around them.

    Garbage City gets its name because its residents get their living by combing through the refuse, the garbage of the residents of Cairo.  They drag what they collect back, and sort through it for anything of value that they can sell or use.  The streets are lined with garbage piles and stinking trash.  The odor can be oppressive.  Surely those who dwell in such a place, made to dwell in such a place, would live in deep despair.  Yet Vujicic says that's not what he found upon visiting them in 2009.  He writes, "The people there live hard lives, to be sure, yet those I met were very caring, seemingly happy, and filled with faith."  In Cairo, a city of 18 million people, Garbage City is the only predominately Christian neighborhood.  We in the west would call it a ghetto.  I don't believe those who live there would do the same.
   Vujicic says that as far as environments go, Garbage City's was the worst he'd seen, "but one of the most heart-warming in spirit."  In the midst of the squalor were churches.  Into one of them 150 people squeezed.  As he spoke, he was moved by the joy and life he felt and saw in the people.  He talked to church leaders concerning the life changing power that had been at work among the people.  They told him that "Their hope wasn't put on this earth, but their hope is in eternity.  In the meantime they'll believe in miracles and thank God for who He is and what he has done."  Their lives went beyond what they could understand, or control, beyond what they had no power to change, and lived in the presence of the One they knew and had experienced to be the God of all of it.  Their bodies were, in a sense, trapped, but their spirits were not.  They moved ever forward trusting and believing their God.
   Few of us in the west will live in such a place as Garbage City, not literally anyway.  Yet, I believe that all of us will find ourselves, if not physically, certainly emotionally and even spiritually, in our own version of Garbage City.  A place we don't want to be.  A place we long to escape.  How shall we then live....in whatever place may come to be our Garbage City?

   In my life, I have found myself at several times in a very real Garbage City of my own.  It grieves my heart to say and remember that my response was very little like that of the Egyptian believers.  Too often, most often, bitterness, anger, and self-pity ruled my heart.  I railed against my circumstances, and sometimes, against God.  For me, I did not often find my own "church" in the midst of it where I could, and did worship Him.  2 Corinthians 2:17 says we are to be "the aroma of life leading to life."  I wonder what "aroma" those around me noticed?  How much a "fragrance of heaven" was my life in those times?  In the Garbage City that you were in, that you may be in now, what aroma arises from your heart in the midst of it?  What worship comes up from our hearts in the midst of our own Garbage City?
   May you and I truly come to have, in any and all situations, no matter how hopeless they might seem, the heartset and mindset that at all times, He is able to in all situations, deliver, heal, or resurrect, but even if He does none of these, we will not cease to believe and trust Him.  May we, like the residents of Garbage City, move ever forward in Him, prisoner to nothing and no one, but Him.  Living our own lives without limit.

Blessings,
Pastor O