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As far back as I can remember, my mother spoke of Jesus like the fifth member in our family. It was as if, in her eyes, he inhabited our home. She didn’t tiptoe around him like a fragile great grandparent, or put up with him like a bedraggled uncle you take in after he’s washed up on life’s shore. He just belonged there like a plain fact and she made room for him and spoke as if he was there, our Invisible Somebody.
She taught that his existence required things of us, often things that we’d rather not do. Like putting on the pinafore and scratchy stockings for church. And resisting the urge to tease our Aunt Kathy, who scribbled words in the air and talked to herself. And saying we were sorry for eating the last bowl of Honeycombs even if we weren’t really sorry, and in fact, enjoyed watching our brother throw a red-faced tantrum at the breakfast table because he wanted some and they were G-O-N-E gone.
And one day his existence meant that we had to go with her to minister at The Dump in Juarez.
The Dump was famous among Christians in El Paso because it’d been the site of a well-attested miracle on Christmas Day of 1972. That day, Father Richard Thomas led a group of people from both sides of the border to feed the poor in obedience to Luke 14:12’s command, “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, and you will be blessed.”
The Dump was an easy place to find such folks. It was a landfill, a vast sea of poverty surfed by “Ragpickers” who lived off the garbage and built their homes from cardboard boxes discarded in the trash. Fr. Thomas and his team had prepared 125 burritos, some fruit, two hams, and some tamales, expecting to feed roughly 125 people. By the end of the day, they’d served 350 and had so much food left over they had to go to three different orphanages to get rid of it all.
I’m not sure it was part of Mom’s original plan to take us. Maybe her childcare fell through. But there we were in her car, driving down Interstate 10 on a mission.
In the memory, I look out over all the brightly clad clapboard shacks dotting the hills of Juarez below. Mixed in with these neighborhoods, small buildings sit unfinished, their exposed rebar and cinder block skeletons inhabited by squatters burning tires to keep warm. We exit the freeway, eventually hitting a dirt road that leads to the hills of garbage. Once we’ve parked next to a few other cars, my brother and I get out and gawk at the filthy children working and playing alongside their families. Their clothes are stiff with dirt, and it doesn't look like they’ve ever had baths. They use two-pronged hoes, pushing aside paper and egg shells and used condoms, sorting out recycling to make a few dollars a week. The smell is a sour, suffocating cloak that hangs in the air and there are flies everywhere, everywhere.
Mom stands in the midst of it all with her blonde hair in barrel curls and a warm, determined smile, shining like a Precious Moments angel amidst the squalor. She beckons Jake and I over to a pickup truck where women from a sister church in Juarez are making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread and pouring Dixie cups of milk. The Filthy Children begin to line up at the tailgate, looking at each other with smiles as if it’s their birthday and they’re about to open a pile of presents.
Jake and I stand to the right of the tailgate and like little child priests, administer the sacraments to the weary flock, reaching up for sandwiches and Dixie cups, then swiveling to pass them out to the children in line. We give out what must be hundreds of sandwiches, sharing the white triangles until we run out of bread and then leaving the remaining peanut butter and jelly jars on a plastic lawn chair for the parents to fight over.
Nothing miraculous happens other than the silence and lack of strife between my brother and I as we ride home and listen to Michael W. Smith sing about Rocketown on the tape deck. Mom is quiet, too.
That night, back in our safe, clean, abundant American lives, Mom tells us that Jesus will reward us for our service to others. It’s a brazen thing to say since she has no way of guaranteeing it’s true, and it teeters on the edge of a transactional deity, a “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” kind of god. But she’s always been the authority on Jesus and it makes sense to my five or six-year old mind, and hell, I want to believe it's the way He works because there has to be an upside to all the hard stuff he makes us do, right?
But now I wonder: Is that why she went to The Dump, too? For a reward, or to witness another miracle? Are those bad things to want when it seems that in Luke 14:12, Jesus blatantly promised blessings for those who host peanut butter jelly banquets for the poor? And why didn’t any of us see that our reward, our utterly undeserved miracle, was that we lived a couple miles north of the Rio Grande instead of south of it?
Our doorbell rings after supper and a neighborhood friend asks Jake and I to go to Western Playland, the local amusement park. My palms get sweaty with excitement and when I look at Mom for permission she smiles and says, See, I told you you’d get rewarded! And that’s when I believed for the first time that Jesus was really among us, and that my mom was the one who would show him to me.