Slum Survivor - for Soul Survivor magazine

This is an article I wrote for Soul Survivor magazine about my experience of taking part in Slum Survivor

It's easy enough to completely avoid and ignore the issues of poverty and injustice in day to day life. We can keep well away from things we'd rather not face; after all, it isn't fun to think about painful subjects. When you care about something, you make yourself vulnerable and your emotions are affected; you get hurt. It's so much easier not to care.

Before Soul Survivor Week A, where I took part in the Slum Survivor challenge, I was guilty of this, and was quite content to lead my life uninterrupted by caring for people hundreds of miles away. But this week I have seen that God calls us to care his heart breaks over the injustice faced by his children, and as we aim to change more into his likeness, the issues that concern God must be the issues that concern us.

The deal for the week was this; build yourself a slum out of chipboard and tarpaulin and live in it for 5 days, with a limited diet and a limited kit, including just one set of clothes. Every day we made paper bags and sold them to the cafe teams on site to earn rupees so we could buy our dinner of rice and dhal [boiled lentils with added spices], which was pretty unappetising. We also made musical instruments and childrens' toys out of scavenged items, sold them to the delegates and exchanged the pounds for rupees. This process was incredibly frustrating. The caf teams were really harsh to us and would either turn us away telling us our bags were rubbish, or pay us ridiculously badly, and the food prices and exchange rate from pounds to rupees changed every day. The point was to imitate the problems faced by people in poverty when they trade. It was one of the most demoralising things I have ever done. When you're tired and hungry and wet and cold, surviving is enough of a struggle already, without having to fight to earn money.

More than one billion people in the world actually face this frustration every day as they struggle to support themselves and their families, and if we don't do something about this number, it will have doubled by 2030. In our society we all buy things without even thinking about the effect, but our choices have serious consequences. By supporting unethical companies with our business, we are unavoidably involved in their actions. Before Slum Survivor I didn't consider myself anything to do with the unfair trade around the world this was probably because I didn't want to! But whether we like it or not, our actions and our choices influence the lives of other people, people who are God's children and made in his image. Unfair trade is a cause of poverty, and so by buying unfairly traded products, we are defiling the creation of God.

We were given a challenge every day, so that we would engage with the issues which people living in slums face. On the fourth day at 9am our instructor Carrie ran up and told us that we had 5 minutes to evacuate the slums and get all of our stuff out, because a flash flood was coming. After a mad rush, we got everything out, and a sigh of relief was audible we were safe. However when Carrie was talking to us, we jumped round as we heard an almighty crash, and saw a 'flood' (JCB forklift truck) destroying our slum. The entirety of the boys room and kitchen were flattened; all of our wood and cardboard was smashed up, and the place was a wreck. We were completely gutted. We had spent hours building the slum and it had finally began to get a bit comfortable, as after 4 days we'd scavenged cardboard to insulate it and put carpet down. As well as obliterating our shelter, the flood washed all of our food and cooking equipment away. It was such a horrible feeling, just being utterly and completely destitute. I know it was just a little hut built out of chipboard, but when you don't have very much, and the little you do have gets taken away from you, it destroys your world.

In this country we have insurance and we have back up plans and there is help available, and if for some reason something does go wrong in our lives, there is always an alternative. But if you live in a slum and it gets destroyed, that is it, you have nothing. We literally had nowhere to go. This was the low point for all of us we hadn't eaten for 24 hours, we had to rebuild our shelter, and we didn't have any prospect of food until we finished the following day. Yet all the time in the back of our minds we knew that we could go home to our families and roofs and walls and fridges and warm beds, while all over the world there are one billion people who live in slums every single day of their lives and have no hope of going home, because the slum is their home. We knew we were in a simulation, but for the one in six people in our world who live in a slum, this is reality.

The biggest thing I have come to realise and the thing which utterly breaks my heart is the fact that for people living in slums, nothing is guaranteed. Everything they own can be swept away in seconds. Traders can refuse to buy their products. They can contract disease so easily. And they are so, so helpless. They have no insurance, no rights, no medicine. They have no voice. But we do, and we are called by God to be a voice for the voiceless. We have an enormous privilege to be able to speak out. We also have an enormous responsibility, and it is not one which we can ignore if we want to see his Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. The kingdom of God is the end of suffering, the end of brokenness, the end of injustice. If we want to see this happen, then we need to see the world through God's eyes, and to have his heart for the poor. A phrase we often hear is 'passion for your name'. If we continue to live ignorant lives, contributing to unfair trade and poverty around the world, then we are standing for injustice and poverty. God is everything that is fair, everything that is just, and everything that is right. Passion for his name means passion for the things which are close to Gods heart, and so we need to defend those who are defenceless, intercede, and speak up. Have your heart broken for the things which break Gods heart, because now is the time.

I signed up for Slum Survivor ready for a challenge. I wanted to be challenged by God to depend more on him. I wanted to be challenged to survive. I wanted to push myself. I wanted to learn to work in a team. I wanted to struggle, and I wanted to succeed. I thought that once all of my comforts were stripped away, I would get closer to God and have a deeper experience of Him. All of my expectations were about me; about my desires and my life. Of course God doesn't always (or even often) follow my plans, and so in actual fact my Slum Survivor experience hasn't been about me and my relationship with my God. It's been about him and his relationship with the poor. And as we come into his likeness, his heart for the poor becomes our heart for the poor. For better or worse, there is now no avoiding the fact that there is more to my life than MY life.

Something to aim for

'But if God's Spirit is in charge, then this is you: you're loving, alive, vibrant, sparkling. You're calm; you walk into a room and friction walks out. You can handle delays; you're not pushy. You're generous with money, with time, with people. You're good and solid, always ready to help. You don't double-cross people; you don't use your fists in anger; you don't lose your rag - you're in control. You're never in trouble with the police. That's you! You're connected with the liberator Jesus and you've murdered your dark side with its 'must have' attitude. Now that we're living with God's Spirit, let's get our heartbeat in rhythm with his.'

Galatians 5:22-25
The Street Bible

The story we are in

What is the theme of God's story? What genre of literature would it be in?

Firstly it's an adventure story, an exciting tale of people searching for hidden treasure, people living wild lives following God, going through ups and downs, being audacious extreme indiana-jones-style-searching-rescuing-aiming-higher-digging-deeper-never-giving-up-running-the-race-disciples.

God's story is a comedy! I love this! God is hilarious - if you don't know him you'll have to take my word for it, or even better find out yourself! If you do know him you will remember experiences when God does totally hilarious things. God has the most genius sense of humour. Read Esther - its so funny! And the story of Samson - we read it as a team the other day and there were frequent bursts of laughter in our office! God's done hilarious things in my life - sometimes I just stop and realise where God has put me and it's so bizarre and just genuinely funny! Little things he does every day, he cracks me up! In our group we were discussing that God must have to dumb down his jokes SO MUCH for us to get them! Because he is so above and beyond us - so maybe he makes a joke, but we don't get it, he makes it more obvious and more obvious again - ah, finally, NOW you get it!

It's also a romance, the story of how God pursues his people, desperately desiring to pour out his love into them and be in relationship with them. The whole of the bible is a story about how God creates people so he can love them and again and again draws them back to him so he can be close to them and connect with them and show them how much he loves and treasures them. As with quite a few romance stories this story included rejection, hurt, betrayal, vulnerability, trust, reconciliation, sacrifice. I know in my heart that God loves me so utterly and completely, and although I don't really understand the true implications of what he's done for me, when I look back at my own life I can see the effort he's put in to drawing me close to him, I know that he pursued me even when I turned my back on him, he didn't give up, even when his love was unrequited, he kept on going and kept waiting for me to open up my heart and accept the love that he offers me. I hope I never get so used to loving God and being aware that God loves me that I forget what it's like to not have that, because then I might stop wondering at it and appreciating it, and I don't want that to happen.

God's story is a tragedy. Honestly, it is tragic that there are people who don't accept what God offers them. In literature, the greatest tragedy is when the character has a chance, an opportunity for success, but for some reason it goes wrong. Like in Hamlet, that guy had such potential to be a great leader, but his one 'fatal flaw' turned his story from a success to a tragedy. He was so close to success but he flushed it all down the toilet (metaphorically speaking). Every single person on this planet has the opportunity to be in relationship with this awesome God. He can give you the most amazing life, he will bless you more then you can possibly imagine, and even better then that, he will let you be a part of what he's doing, he will let you be a part of his Kingdom coming. Jesus died so that we can have a fresh start and be released from all the junk we have accumulated in our lives. It is truly a tragedy that people don't accept what is offered to them.

So what genre is God's story? I can't pick one, and sometimes people experience some genres of God's story but not others, yet they're all still there. I'm reminded of a book I read as a child where I could decide what choice the character made and go to page 23, or go to page 49, based on that The rest of the story is still there, but for you, it only goes the way you have followed (unless you cheat and read the other routes as well which I always did!). The author has written this story and all the possible ways you could go, but you the reader get to chose what happens. This gave me such an insight into what God's story, and our story, is like. God is the author of life; I know that he has written out and planned my days. But even though he's already written my life before I've lived it, I still get to chose what happens. Everyone does. That's why God's story is an adventure, and a comedy, and a romance, and a tragedy, and many more genres. It's all of these things and we influence which parts we experience. Your story will be an adventure if you decide to explore and take opportunities and follow Jesus, because he is WILD and he will take you places you can't even imagine. Your story will be a comedy if you ask God to come and reveal himself to you, if you ask him to be a part of your life every day, because then you get to know who God is and that he invented humour and that part of his character is that he is very very funny. Your life IS a romance. God loves you. You don't get to decide that. But you get to decide if it will be a tragedy, if you will not take this love that is freely offered, or if you will open your heart to God and let him show you how he wants your story to continue from here on.