The Nobody Revolution

This week I visited a community about an hour away from the Hands @ Work base. It is one of the poorest of all the nearby communities in the country’s most AIDS infected region. A couple of us were invited to see the free clinic. We walked into a narrow corridor in which we could barely move for all the people, young and old, mothers and children, waiting for treatment. It was a great clinic with great facilities, but the stark hopelessness evident in the place was that many of these people, even with the treatment offered, would die. I couldn’t bring myself to ask what one young baby no older than a few months was suffering with that made him cough so much in the arms of his young Mum. I realise that hope never comes easy. Yet the place where it is most important to cling to hope is in the place where it is most difficult to do so. For these people, hope is not found in the faces of the few mlungu (white folk) that pass through their lives, and it certainly isn’t to be sought in the offices of government. As a care worker that walked me through the clinic yesterday said, presidents and politicians will never hear the names of communities like this one. For them the places where there is no hope are best forgotten and left to die. And yet here hope does have a face. And a name. Let me tell you Roger’s story.

Roger is a young man, no older than 20. He is himself an orphan and a carer for younger siblings, yet on top of that he’s also the youth worker for the entire community, a group that comprises many of his own peers. We spent a little bit of time with Roger as the village’s most vulnerable kids (themselves orphans) came together to be fed by the care workers. Afterwards we watched as Roger gathered the whole group together: young kids, teenage boys causing trouble, even the care workers themselves, and he spoke to them. Someone translated for us later what he had said. He told them that everything in life is a gift given without cost. It was therefore their responsibility to give of themselves freely, and in doing so they would make a difference in their worlds. He told them that with gratitude and with courage they could change the world around them. I looked to Roger and saw that with his words and with his life he is bringing waves of hope to those most destitute of it. God is using him to breathe life into dry bones. He is a light in a valley of darkness and death. And yet...the world will never know his name. He’s not going to win a Nobel Prize for services to the poor. He will probably never be invited to speak at a Christian festival or write an article for a Christian magazine. He is in all respects a ‘nobody’. Yet he is changing the world in the name of Christ.  The Kingdom of God is upside down, or you could say right side up. God loves to use nobodies. In fact it’s the only people he uses. Why? Because “man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” The Kingdom turns the world right-side up and translates cowards into warriors, murderers into deliverers, the childless into fathers and nobodies into princes. The Kingdom of God belongs to those by whose hands it is built. We don’t know their names yet, but there is a silent army that knows the heart of the Father and is living to be beautiful feet in a broken world. These ‘nobodies’ will be the champions of heaven. I am amazed every day by the servant heart of those who care for the sick and the vulnerable in their communities. Many do it without incentive and all do it without pay. Yesterday I met a woman who walked 20km from her home to visit the children, then 20km back. Such is the life of a servant – spending themselves on behalf of the poor. For us too, we must bring what we can, but if we want to affect the world we have to start with our own hearts. We have to do everything from a desperate desire to serve. Jesus said of John the Baptist that there has never been anyone greater in the Kingdom of God. Why? Because he prayed from a genuine heart: “Jesus must become more, I must become less!” Do you know why Jesus is the King of heaven? Paul tells us. It’s because he humbled himself, more than any man or woman ever has or could hope to – the God of the universe, forgotten and alone on a cross (Philippians 2). It takes trust not to puff up yourself but to let God do the exalting. Yet we have to stick a flag in the ground and decide where our loyalty lies – to invest in these miserable few years of TV and taxes, or to live the servant’s life and claim the champion’s honour in heaven. By the sweat and tears of ‘nobodies’ like Roger the Kingdom of God is being built and the world transformed. We are desperately in need of a revolution of nobodies.