By Alex Florez
In a remote corner of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, there is a poor village. The streets are narrow, and trash is scattered everywhere. Buildings exhibit half-built walls, missing doors, and in some cases, entire second levels have been left open to the elements. The material poverty—in contrast to my life back home—seems unbearable.
I wonder, “Lord, how can people live like this?”
But I have misunderstood a critical reality about the nature of my visit: what the locals need is not to have what I have, to live like I live, or to enjoy what I deem to be an adequately comfortable life. They need the light of Jesus, and so do I.
As Isaiah declared, “thick darkness is over the peoples, but the LORD rises upon you” (Isaiah 60:2), but I wonder about the nature of this “darkness.” In my cultural experience, “darkness” is the absence of wealth and the lack of those creature comforts that I take for granted, like central air conditioning and uninterrupted wi-fi signals. This kind of darkness has become synonymous with poverty, which I have been conditioned to avoid at all costs.
But I must check these presumptions of mine against the true directive we have received from the Lord: to share the light of Christ, and for my heart particularly in this scenario, to humbly bask in the light of Christ emanating from the people we’ve met here.
Our daily experience may be different, but we are all engaged in a cosmic struggle against spiritual darkness. Our access to goods and services may be wildly incongruent, but true darkness is our vulnerability as the shadow of death looms over all humankind. My sense of what is necessary in this life may be entirely out of sync because God has said that our need is for “the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ” (2Corinthians 4:6), and that is precisely the same whether in the Dominican Republic or America.
God has beautifully shown me how we exchange the light of Christ with one another here, in spite of my imperfect mindset. Through our mission team, He has provided school supplies and sports equipment; He used us to pour the concrete foundation and build new walls for three homes; the physicians He sent with our group have seen dozens of patients who otherwise have limited access to healthcare. God has made an undeniable impact on the material experience of the people here. On the other end of this divine reciprocity, our vibrant, kind, and generous new friends have opened their homes to us; they taught my daughter how to dance the merengue; they told us funny stories and prayed with us. Their lives embody our shared conviction: Jesus is the “light of all mankind” (John 1:4 NIV)— the materially poor and the inordinately wealthy alike—and I stand to gain as much from them as they do from me.
Light is funny like that: once it’s out, it can’t be contained or exclusively claimed by any single person or group of people. True Light, which is to say Jesus Himself, is not static or stationary; it dawned about 2,000 years ago, and His light is still dawning on our horizon too.
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