A New Way of Seeing (Saved for Each Other)

Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!

Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.

-The New Zealand Anglican Lord’s Prayer

I wanted to savor each sip of chai in the tiny aluminum cup. I didn’t mind its heat on my hands even though my scarf was already stuck to my chest, wet with sweat and humidity from the monsoon rains on the horizon. I gulped down my tea though because there was work to do.

I was twenty-four when I spent two months in Mumbai, living with two local social workers and walking with them each day into the heart of the largest slums in Asia. We worked alongside teachers and women leading training programs, showing up in the midst of incredible need and resilience. And it was there, in the messy beauty of that summer, that I finally met the Jesus I had been chasing for a decade.

Ever a rule-follower, when I started attending church at fourteen, I took the systematic approach to becoming a good Christian. Pray a prayer and get saved (rededicate your life to Jesus if you mess up) and get baptized—check. Go to church and find places to serve—check. Study the Bible—check. Go out and tell people about Jesus and bring them into the church so the cycle can begin all over again with them—check.

I am forever grateful for the foundation I received as a teen hungry for love, community, and purpose. I learned to talk to God like a friend, to be responsible for my own spiritual growth, to love the Word of God, and to serve others. But that was only part of the picture. The Jesus I wanted so desperately still eluded me.

I was taught the world was a dark, scary, sinful place I needed to shield myself from. It wasn’t going to get any better until Jesus came back and saved us from it all. I thought that is what church was for—a place to prepare and equip us to go out and bring others into the hope of a world better than this one. We were saved from something, and we had a mission.

But in the muddy paths between the tin and wood slum houses, I found a community that upended everything I thought I knew about what Christ came to do in this world, about God’s work of reconciliation. Like the early church, they truly depended on each other for everything. It was there I started to realize the Kingdom of God was already here, that we could be bearers of the goodness of God among each other.

In those days I saw poverty, hunger, trafficking, injustice, and suffering like I had never seen before. I also saw families God had restored, lives that had been made new, people willing to suffer to help others, and children clinging to the hope that this life could be better because of the Good News they came to that little church to hear each week. I saw Muslims, Hindus, and Christians working together to make their little corner of the earth a better place for each other.

Every Sunday the kids we taught during the week showed up in tattered dresses and suits, smiling and calling out, “Namaste, teacher!” We sat and laughed over those hot cups of chai for a few minutes and then rolled up the mats we sat on, packed up the drums, and swept the floor. Class would start early the next day, and we had lots of families to visit.

The church building was swept away moments after the Sunday service was over, returning to its other purpose as a schoolroom. But the Church, she remained. She dispersed throughout the slum to care for her people. Church didn’t stop with a worship service. My friends went out to talk to people about the lack of nutrition they experienced, about the injustice they encountered, about education for their children, and about job training for women. They went out and really listened to the problems people were experiencing and asked how they could help.

“We are so quick, as human beings, to get our salvation and then make it personal. It's all about Jesus and me,” said civil rights activist, community developer, and Bible teacher, John Perkins. “What would happen if we organized with the expectation that God is going to use us in one another's lives—if we recognized the importance of those around us to our own spiritual growth?”

The interdependence Perkins talks about is what opened my eyes that summer to a whole new way of seeing. I saw how each person’s life was tangled up in the others. This is a bedrock of Asian communal culture.

It should also be a bedrock of communities of faith around the world, working together to see the Kingdom coming among us. Each person contributed to the other’s spiritual growth, iron sharpening iron. But it was more than that; they wanted to see justice done among them, to be a part of each other’s flourishing in this life.

When I started seeing the gospel as being about more than escaping the wicked world and more about seeing God restore and transform it, I finally saw the Good News, indeed.

“The most important need in the Christian world today is this inner truth nourished by this Spirit of contemplation: the praise and love of God, the longing for the coming of Christ, the thirst for the manifestation of God's glory, his truth, his justice, his Kingdom in the world,” said Trappist monk Thomas Merton, “Without this contemplative orientation we are building churches not to praise him but to establish more firmly the social structures, values, and benefits that we presently enjoy.”

I’ve spent the twenty years since those days in the slums chasing after the Jesus who prayed, “Your Kingdom come...on earth as it is in heaven.”

I’ve glimpsed him in more slow cups of chai on street corners in Dhaka, laughing with my diverse group of friends from language school. I saw him in the eyes of the Rohingya woman who held my hand inside her makeshift home in the refugee camp as she shared how she fled across the river after watching extremists burn her village to the ground. He ministered to my soul through the words of a spiritual director 8000 miles away, who met with me over a video chat. She held my culture shock and anxiety and wept with me as we sat together in silence. I sat with him over a cup of coffee while the priest listened patiently as I shared the ache I felt for a home I couldn’t find, and she invited me to just visit her church for a while with no pressure to do anything—to stop looking for Jesus in all the doing and to learn to just be.

In all these people, I found the Christ who’d been elusive for so many years, the God who saved us not just from something, but for something. For each other.

*Essay originally published in August 2020 at The Mudroom Blog

Post-Script

When I wrote this in August 2020, I was still standing on the threshold of something new—nine months into attending an Episcopal church, just beginning to learn the shape of the liturgical year, the contours of Anglican theology, and what it might mean to belong to a faith rooted not only in belief but in community practice. Most of that time had unfolded in the solitude of a global pandemic, and still, something in me said yes to this slower, steadier way.

I’ve since taken the plunge I was only considering then, committing my life to this tradition and walking deeper into my vocation. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that conversion isn’t a moment; it’s a lifetime. I suspect I’ll spend the rest of mine unlearning and relearning—listening, repenting, seeing more clearly, loving more truly.

The path is not linear, and the destination isn’t personal arrival but communal transformation. I want to keep being shaped by others—by their stories, their suffering, their joy. I want to keep noticing where I’ve missed the mark and choosing again to live as if the Kingdom is coming, on earth as in heaven. Because it is. And we get to be part of that unfolding, together.