The Narrow Road

"Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.” Luke 13:24

Nobody said it was going to be easy; I never expected it to be. Only through the grace of God am I sustained and strengthened, especially when the door starts to narrow uncomfortably.

The particular mission we have been called to is not just about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, or turning tears to laughter. As I reflect more and more about it, that’s probably the easy part. For indeed, seeing God every day in the face of the poorest of the poor is reward in itself.

And yet only recently have I realized the truth that choosing to follow Christ means not only doing what He instructed, but actually sharing in His suffering.

In this one week, three children whose lives were touched by the foundation died. We did not know any one of them well enough to say that we came to love them, but each of them was sent to us to be cared for. And despite that, all suffered ends that the rest of the world would call “senseless.”

A newborn infant, whose mother lived on the streets and plied her sampaguitas right up to the point of labor, chain-smoking the entire time. He lived 11 days, and died from pneumonia complicated by the hole in his heart. Anthony Alcaraz, 10 years old, who used to come to the center for feeding and whose last conversation with Kuya Joe Dean was while Anthony was caught trying to steal metal railings on the highway in the middle of the night. He was found in the creek, strangled to death with a nylon cord. And a young man named JR, found by Kuya and Vince ragged, filthy, starving and suffering from epileptic seizures, on the floor of the empty He Cares unit in Montalban. He was a criminal and an addict, or so the people at the Health Center and the police outpost right beside the unit said. Not even his family bothered to take care of him, so why should they? A few nights later, we found that JR had indeed found his way home…after his family finally claimed his dead body – a body containing a soul that at least was given some amount of dignity by Kuya and Vince during its last moments on earth.

Our French volunteer was distraught; I suspect he didn’t quite expect to sign up for this kind of emotional bungee jump. Three deaths in one week on a mission involving children – who, in the normal scheme of the universe, should outlive their elders. He quoted Victor Hugo in his grief over the loss of a child, I quoted Mother Teresa in her love that made sense of the “senseless” grief surrounding her.

And the narrow door looms; the narrow road continues to wend into the distance. Just yesterday, one of my biggest fears became reality: that in the course of your mission you are maliciously suspected of something sinister. White missionary + streetchildren = screaming paranoid bystander and a truckload of goons just waiting for any opportunity to beat anyone up. If not for the grace of God and the protection of His Most Holy Blood…I would rather not think of what could have happened and instead fall at His feet in gratitude.

Difficulties like this are designed to make you want to stop, take stock, assess the risks, and turn back. Yet when we think about how the Pathmaker Himself carved out that lonely, solitary path that led to unspeakable suffering, we pick ourselves up from where we left off. And when we think about how His suffering led to our eternal salvation, we continue to walk, ever mindful of where His footprints lead, through that narrow door, down that narrow road.