justice, jesus, & just getting through
It feels like moments ago I was boarding the plane to go to DC, on my way to begin a new chapter in a new city I adore, en route to work with the organization that had up until that point only impacted me from afar, but would soon come to change me up close. The phrase “life-changing” is a big and weighty one, and I am making a conscious effort not to use it so frequently, even though, when you think about it, every season is life-changing in one way or another. We usually can’t move as humans through periods of time without things changing in some way, physically at the very least, relationally most usually, mentally, spiritually.
Anyway -
A few years ago, while on a trip to Rwanda, our team, there to train lay social workers and serve local churches, read a book. It was called The Good News About Injustice, and essentially it was about a man named Gary Haugen, who worked for the Department of Justice, and was sent to various post-conflict zones as an attorney. Gary was in charge of the prosecution in post-genocide-Rwanda, where nearly 1 million people were killed in cold blood by their own neighbors. While our team was in Rwanda, we heard firsthand accounts of the genocide, and the stories to this day rock me to my core and make me want to flip a table. Our team would read chapters of Gary’s book and visit the sites from which he wrote. The whole experience wrecked my heart, and I spent many a night on the floor of our room sobbing.
In the book, Gary, realizing that Christians like himself had a duty to care for those who were suffering, and to do what they could to prevent these atrocities, founded International Justice Mission, an international NGO of mostly Christian lawyers who sought to protect the poor from violence by helping to come alongside justice systems who weren’t doing so. Gary and two interns started the organization, and here we are 22 years later, and IJM has helped to rescue thousands, reduce impunity (lack of punishment for a crime), and bring perpetrators to justice all over the world.
Intrigued by IJM and by what struck me an an inexplicable relationship of faith to human rights work, I began to follow what IJM was doing around the world, and continued to as I started school in New York. It was some combination of the IJM story, my experiences abroad, and my inability to turn away from the injustice I saw, that led me to study Human Rights and Policy at NYU, and give my heart and time in pursuit of justice and freedom of the oppressed.
Needless to say, getting the opportunity to intern with IJM would not only feel full circle to me, but would also be a wondrous exploration of how my faith in Jesus interacts with my passion for justice, and my heartbreak at justice’s perversion. The first day of the internship, I walked into the building ridiculously uncertain with what was to come, yet remarkably expectant. Maybe it was my preoccupation with these feelings then that made me nearly run face first into Gary Haugen himself, who, surprisingly was on the elevator with me. This man who had unknowingly impacted my life and path in incredible ways, and who had also in many ways changed the world, was standing right in front of me, smiling earnestly.
Something that would come to mark my time at IJM would be the phrase “unguarded earnestness” which Gary and many other senior leaders used to describe the way they seek to be with God and with those around them. It would be the phrase that I would learn fits Gary like a glove, and this along with his kindness and intentionality completely flipped my idea of leadership on its head. At one point, during a dinner he and his wife hosted solely for our intern class, and after going around telling us our names (he’d learned them all), Gary was asked how he handles the leadership he has and the incredible thing that is IJM. He looked at us, shrugged, and said words I’ll never forget “I don’t know, God could have used anyone. IJM still could have and would have happened without me. He was probably just looking around and said ‘hey Gary, want to come along and do this?’ and I just said ‘yes’”. The sheer humility of a man none of us would have blamed for being at least a little prideful struck me and still strikes me as something that in itself is world changing.
The leaders in our immediate sight usually aren’t like this, they boast and promote themselves, and their impact depends on who is responsive to that promotion. But leadership in the way of Jesus is synonymous with laying down oneself for the good of others - a model IJM follows well.
There is so much I could say about what it has been like to work in this mission everyday. It’s broken me, for one. I worked as the Latin America Regional Intern, which means that I was working mainly with our operations and offices in the LA region. We have four offices in some of the toughest and most violent countries in the world. And everyday I was reading studies and reports that took a hammer to my heart. Kids being sexually abused in Guatemala, sex trafficking in the Dominican Republic, violence against women and femicide in Peru, and more. In a political moment where migration is a topic of discussion and polarized policy, I am overwhelmingly aware that at the end of the day, so much of it is people fleeing in fear of these very things that IJM is working to end. I see it all now a little differently, and maybe the answer is not a wall or tougher agents or more hoops to jump through. Maybe it’s simply compassion, and a desire to do what we can to help fix the systems that can’t protect those they were built to protect.
Something I’ve taken from working in this realm and reading all the time about hard and weighty things, is that we tend to turn off feeling entirely just to get through. Part of me thought “if I feel this right now, I am going to lose it. So I’ll treat it like data, I’ll do my work, and just get by.” This tactic eventually caught up to me, and I completely lost it while on a run one day. I sat on the side of the road weeping. Another time, I saw a sweet family with three kids on the subway, and I thought about the young ones I had been reading about being abused and raped by members of their own family, and there I was, crying silently on the train.
The reality is, we have to be able to confront injustice, fight it with everything we have, but be tender to our hearts in the aftermath. I believe even the most fearless and free fighters need fierce love and tenderness.
There is so much to this work of justice. And if there is anything I know now, it’s how little I actually know. President of IJM Sean Litton said once that he had a job as a teenager to destroy a concrete backyard patio so it could be replaced. He was given a giant hammer, and he thought he’d have it done in a few days. But when he swung the hammer, nothing happened, and it took him an hour to make even a little chip. The concrete was reinforced, and he was struck with just how hard it can be, even with strong arms and the right tools, to make a change in something so deeply rooted and reinforced. Systems of power and oppression and injustice are like this too, and we, with our big hammers and brave hearts, have to be willing to know that we will work very hard sometimes for very little visible change.
