Over winter break I went on a mission trip to Tecate, Mexico. The team was there to minister to the community by showing God’ s love in very practical ways – we worked on repairing houses, a kindergarten, and played with the kids in sports, song, and arts and crafts. We went into the trip knowing that Tecate was an especially poor area. In Tecate, much of the population is made up of people who have spent all their money to get to the border, only to find that they don’t have enough money or any way to cross it. So, they stay in Tecate and try to make a living for themselves.

Everyday when we drove from our living quarters to the work sites I was stunned by the way people were living just across the border. Most of the houses were smaller than my room back home. They were dirty, cold, vandalized, and mostly made of cardboard, rough cinderblocks, and plywood. There was trash everywhere; I remember playing soccer with one of the children when he almost fell into some trashed barbed wire while chasing the ball.

It was a struggle for me to absorb all the details of poverty and then let them shake my soul. Prior to this trip, serving the poor was just another good thing to do, and so I did it – but I was simply going through the motions. With the little bit of social justice activism that I encountered in high school, the proliferation of such clubs in Berkeley’s campus, and an even further growing trend of people picking up on social justice issues, “social justice” become just another cliche to me. I was really tired of mantras about poverty and homelessness.

I found that in Tecate, faced with such a real picture of poverty, I could no longer allow myself to become numb or to respond by simply going through the motions. I found that I really didn’t care for the people in poverty, and that I just wanted to get the job done. Working with the children of the community everyday really connected people and people’s stories to my mental image of poverty. And so I realized that I had to continuously fight my emotional inclination to revert to a numbness towards the very examples of poverty in front of me. Then, working on the roofs of the houses, on refurbishing the fencing, on painting the kindergarten became acts of God’s love to people – not just another job or duty but helping someone who really needed God experience God’s love.

The people in Tecate responded to our work there with abundant gratitude. Every “thank you” I received and the food that the residents cooked for us felt like undeserved praise and too much to give to me, a comfortable Asian American in a upper-middle class family. I felt bad – like I didn’t deserve it at all.

I realized during one of the reflection times that the feeling of undeserving came because in the face of the poverty in Mexico, and in the face the people who lived in the midst of that poverty, my sins stood out clearly. I was living in comfort and not giving a thought to those outside my little bubble. And usually, when receiving gratitude from those less fortunate than I was, I would inappropriately respond by feeling sorry because they were serving me generously despite their poverty. It was a selfish and shallow, “I feel bad” response.

The appropriate response to their gratitude was to understand the depth of my depravity – just as God’s unconditional love towards me, an ill-deserving sinner, shows the depth of my sin. I am just another sinner saved by God’s grace doing God’s work – I don’t believe I should receive gratitude, and yet I do. The only person who deserved gratitude was God, and I realized that God was bringing their suffering and our work to His glory.

When I returned home, I was shocked and saddened to learn of the tremendous earthquake that had hit Haiti. The pictures of poverty in Tecate were fresh in my mind, and I found myself praying for Haiti and genuinely concerned for that country – when before I would skim over any sort of tragic story I found in the news. It was a reminder for me to not simply let my emotions drive my actions. It was a reminder for me to cling onto the Word of God and to let God remind me and form me into the Christian He wants me to be.

Now that I’m back in Berkeley, the temptation to slip back into my little bubble is a little overwhelming. But I keep myself reminded by faithfully reading the Scriptures and allow their truth – and not my feelings – decide how I should act and continue to be molded by Jesus into His likeness. It’s about following God into uncomfortable and difficult situations so that I can be reminded of the hardships and suffering that other people go through and continuously pray for them.