A Normal Day

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#6 Lend Things

Imagine that you are the richest person in your town. You don’t feel rich, but you are. You have things at your disposal that your neighbors could only dream of: things like ibuprofen, hammers (more than one!), a wheelbarrow, Scotch tape, fingernail clippers, and other delights.

Also, if times are hard and food is scarce and money even scarcer, you can be counted on to have corn-flour, beans, and money.

These volleyball-loving kids would stop by almost daily to borrow the pump to put air in their ball.

Our team spends a lot of time lending things to our Nahuatl friends. This means a trip to the door to see what the person needs and then a trip outside later (if we’re lucky) to receive the borrowed item back. If we’re not so lucky, this means a trip for us to the borrower’s house to fetch back our lent item for our use.

When a friend of mine wanted to make bread, she stopped by to borrow flour, yeast, a bowl, and a cookie sheet.

In this culture it’s not always polite to cut to the chase. So lending a hammer might mean a 20 minute visit, just shooting the breeze while the visitor builds up goodwill to ask for the item he needs to borrow.

The decorations for this school graduation were made with paper, cardboard, scissors, glue, and other things borrowed from our house. They were very disappointed that we didn’t have any glitter.

All this lending takes a lot of time. And I would be lying if I said that it didn’t get old. Some days, on about the 18th interruption to my work by a borrower, it gets very old, indeed.

To be good community members, we need to borrow as well as lend. This shows that we need others. Here we borrowed a man’s donkey to get our luggage down from the airstrip.

But lending stuff is a great way to show God’s love. It shows that we are part of a community of inter-dependency. It shows that we see the stuff we own as God’s, able to benefit a whole town.

These cute little dudes stopped by to borrow our toys.

Read more about our team’s journies “to the fence” in this old blog post.