Torment Inside

Colombia is the party capital of the world. If the wind changes direction, una fiesta grande (a really big party) is likely to break out in celebration of the change. Saturday night the adminstrators of our apartment building threw a party for all the residents. It was a great opportunity for us to meet our neighbors and immerse ourselves in cultural anthropology. Besides, answering The Great Commission does begin with our neighbors…doesn’t it?

The subject of our Insights this week is a widow we met who has two teenage children. Her name is Cristina. She is a very beautiful young woman about thirty years old. Cristina is in many ways typical of a lot of young women we see in Colombia, particularly in Pereira. Cristina has had her entire face and body surgically enhanced. There is an extreme obsession with the outward appearance here. One of the most popular prime time television shows here is called “Without Breasts There’s No Paradise” (PG version of the actual Spanish title). It is a nightly soap opera based here in Pereira. There is also a top selling novel by the same title. The theme revolves around a 17-year old call girl who agonizes that her flat chest is a barrier between deliverance from poverty and a life of ease as a drug trafficker’s pampered plaything. See more about the show at : www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14906271/ Sadly, we see this tragedy daily in the lives of people like Cristina.

During the party Cristina began to cry when a Colombian love song began to play. It was then that we learned she was a widowed single mother. Her husband had been shot and killed in Cali last year. One more casualty in a seemingly endless stream of drug war deaths. Cristina has had her exterior sculpted to near perfection but when you look into her crying eyes you see the emptiness, pain, and deadness that hides inside.

Jesus said this about the phenomenon of outward appearances: 

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, pretenders (hypocrites)! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but within they are full of extortion (prey, spoil, plunder) and grasping self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and of the plate, so that the outside may be clean also. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, pretenders (hypocrites)! For you are like tombs that have been whitewashed, which look beautiful on the outside but inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything impure. Matthew 23:25-27 Amplified Bible

*Culture exists on many levels. It is all-encompassing for each people. Some of it is on the surface; much more important is the underlying “worldview.” This is the deepest level of culture. Unless worldview changes, the people will not really change. If the Gospel affects only surface levels, the result is “syncretism” or a mixing of external shifts with unchanged cultural foundations.

When Spain colonized Latin America, many tribes were forced to convert on pain of death. These groups changed outwardly and began using Christian words and ceremonies. However, underneath they still worshiped their former gods and feared the dark spirits. No godly changes resulted. This is an example of syncretism.* (From Perspectives Exposure: Discovering God’s Heart for All Nations and Our Part in His Plan. A condensed version of Perspectives on the World Christian Movement.)

Colombia is still roughly 95% Roman Catholic, a highly synchronistic Roman Catholicism that accepts local traditions as valid (witch doctors, vodoo, animism) while vehemently and sometimes violently opposed to anything Protestant. For 500 years the religion of Colombia’s outward appearance has maintained a “Christian” facade but inside it has conformed to the world and culture around it.

Paul wrote in his letter, interestingly enough, to the church at Rome:

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:2

Continue to join us in prayer as we share the truth of the life transforming gospel of Jesus Christ with people like Cristina. So we may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect, Jesus Christ.

Five more souls have been credited to your accounts in heaven this week. Kevin preached a sermon on the “power of the resurrection” Friday night. Four men and one woman joined in a prayer to be saved. We will be teaching Tuesday morning and evening in a local school of missions and Christine will be teaching in a home group Wednesday.

Thank you for your faithfulness in keeping us in your prayers.