Update: Congrats to Denise, Eleanor, Sarah, Pat, and Rebecca for winning this giveaway!
In Wherever the River Runs, Kelly Minter invites us on a jungle adventure down a river teeming with piranhas, caymans, a beautiful people, and, especially, God’s presence. Her honest and engaging narrative pulls back the curtain on one of the most captivating places on earth as well as on parts of the gospel we may be able to recite but have never fully believed. For anyone feeling complacent in their American Christianity, Kelly’s story of the forgotten people of the Amazon and how they transformed her understanding of the gospel, is sure to inspire.
Sometimes it takes encountering a world vastly different from your own to wake you up to what’s right in front of you. I don’t know why this is. Maybe it’s the shock of smelling a new scent of poverty or sweeping your hand across a different texture of pain or hearing a fresh echo of spiritual hopelessness that quickens your senses to detect the needs that already surround you, the ones you’ve grown used to, the ones you’ve stopped sensing.
Of course I’d handed dollar bills to the homeless selling newspapers at streetlights, I’d sent checks to local ministries at Christmastime, and I’d whipped up some high-calorie comfort casseroles for church outreach events to the needy. But all that represented “normal” poverty and problems that I didn’t have the pleasure of jumping into a boat and floating down the Amazon to get to.
Tending to these issues at home didn’t come with the morning campfire songs, the starry sky, or the round-the-clock fanfare of fellowship and encouragement.
I was quickly going to realize that Jesus’s specific call to love my neighbor was going to be, in some ways, more difficult than loving the people across the ocean with the exotic wildlife. Loving the poor for a week at a time with your family and best friends on an exquisite adventure is rather different from slogging through the complexities and choices that surround the suffering and needy who dwell in your own community.
As my sister once put it to me, it’s almost always easier to take care of someone else’s poor. For one thing, our own poor have problems that remind us a troubling amount of ourselves. And for another, they’re always right there—you don’t get to fly home and leave them after a week.
Here I’d been witness to this winding river that hosts countless people, and they are countless; no one truly has any idea how many individuals breathe along its banks, at least not within a few hundred thousand, give or take, and I was wondering why more people from the major cities of Brazil weren’t reaching out to their own backyard.
Where were the sponsoring churches? Where were the Brazilian mission agencies? Where were the Christ-following families? Well, they were in the same place we are: Doing their thing. Busy. Going to church and Bible studies. Making dinner. Throwing birthday parties. Standing in line at the bank. Cheering at football games (although they’ll happily remind you theirs is a superior kind).
And don’t misunderstand me, the Brazilian church is ministering to its people in the Amazon, but at about the same rate we as American Christians are giving ourselves to the neighbors, projects, sick, homeless, and spiritual wanderers living in our midst.
If I were going to wish that Manaus would seek out its own river people, I would have to hold myself to that same standard and ask what I was doing in my community. What “Amazon” was I missing, practically living on top of, merely because the “harvest field,” as Jesus referred to it, had blended into the background of my everyday life, just like the river people had disappeared into Manaus’s landscape? For some reason, it took seeing Brazil’s mission field before I could clearly see my own.
Excerpt from Wherever the River Runs by Kelly Minter
We’re giving away FIVE copies of Kelly’s new book! Enter to win by leaving a comment with your first name and last name!
By entering today’s giveaway, you acknowledge Lifeway Christian Resource’s official promotion rules. Today’s giveaway starts at the posting time of this blog and ends next Tuesday (8/22/14) at 11:59 p.m. CST. You must be 18 to enter, and you may only enter once. The winner/s will be selected at random. For questions about the rules and regulations of this giveaway, please contact Bud Harlan at One Lifeway Plaza, Nashville, TN 37234-140.
