Many times over the years, my urban mentors have reminded me that the poor don’t need me. Rather, I need the poor.

I was reminded of this truth rather powerfully last week when none of the gringos (except for me) were able to come to the Spanish speaking bible study that meets at our house, so our group consisted of only myself and four of my undocumented Mexican friends. One of the families (Felipe and Monica) lives five blocks north of us and has been splitting time between Juarez (their home) and Denver. They were in Juarez in April when gunfire between warring drug lords broke out in front of their trailer. Everyone hit the deck and waited for the shooting to stop. When silence finally returned, they walked outside of their home to see five corpses, one of which was that of their 9 year old son. Another woman at the study was Ana, an undocumented mother of three who lives in an apartment a few blocks from us. The fourth person was an undocumented Mexican woman who now lives in Houston but was visiting for a couple weeks.

I started our time by asking how everyone was doing. Felipe and Monica said that it had been an exceptionally hard week, as the waves of grief around the loss of their son had been especially intense. They began to sob. Ana broke into a mini-sermon to remind them that God loves them and that he disciplines those he cares about. She sited both the life of Job and her own. I’ve known Ana for four years, but learned for the first time that her first child had died at 6 months of age. Ana talked about the extreme grief that she has known that comes with the loss of a child, but that for some reason God wants to take some of us home early, which she stated is what he had done with the son of Felipe and Monica. Felipe and Monica continued to weep; Ana continued to preach and comfort. We eventually laid hands on them and prayed. Afterwards, we opened our bibles to James 5:10-11 and moved forward with what we had previously planned to study:

Brothers and sisters, as an example of patience in the face of suffering, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. As you know, we count as blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job’s perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.

 Felipe and Monica are homeless and – for the moment – living with Monica’s family. They are looking for a low-rent place to stay. As they were leaving they saw a For Rent sign in front of the apartment across the street. I explained that the reason it is for rent is that it was vacated the previous Saturday after an intruder broke into the neighboring house, tied up the man, and attempted to rape the woman. When she resisted, the intruder pistol whipped her and then shot (and missed) as she ran in terror from the house. We don’t have to worry, I explained, because the police ended up shooting and killing the intruder after a high-speed chase through our neighborhood. Ana replied that we don’t have to worry because God loves us and protects us. Felipe said at least this is a safer place than Juarez, which has the highest per capita murder rate in the world, higher even than Mogadishu, Somalia.

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During the Summer months we often host groups of North Americans on what we call “vision trips.” In contrast to a “mission trip,” (centered on what an outsider is invited to come and “do” in another culture), a vision trip focuses on the invitation for an outsider to come and “see” what God is doing through local, grassroots leaders serving their own people in hard places. By becoming students of God’s activity in a foreign place, the hope is that well-crafted encounters, historical analysis and targeted theological reflection will lead participants into an ability to re-imagine and broaden their own personal understanding of life and mission. French author Marcel Proust writes, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.”

 We are not unaware of the controversy that has risen in the face of such endeavors. Last year, Kenyan leader Kennedy Odede published an article in the New York Times entitled “Slumdog Tourism”  writing that “slum tourism turns poverty into entertainment, something that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from. People think they’ve really “seen” something — and then go back to their lives and leave me, my family and my community right where we were before.”  This article ignited a flurry of blogging activity where short-term missions trips, in addition to “Slumdog Tourism,” were tagged as “Ghetto Tours”, “Poverty Safari’s” and even “Poverty Porn.” (Click here  for a great discussion on this).

 In hopes of avoiding these pitfalls, we have come to see well-crafted vision trips as a means to liberate “mission” from incarceration to the limitations of a “trip” or the responsibility of a select “committee” in a church. The idea, rather, is to learn to see mission as lifestyle. One of the passages that inspired a Vision Trip experience this past week for us here in Guatemala City was the story of blind Bartimaeus in Luke 18. Bartimaeus cannot see anything with his “eyes” but at a particular moment during the “religious parade” happening around him, he discerns something with his heart that he must respond to. He asks those around him what is occurring and learns that “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.”

 To the chagrin of the others, Bartimaeus yells and screams until Jesus stops and invites him to a meeting in the street. Looking at the absurdity of his actions, it’s as if Bartimaeus embodies the words in the conclusion to the novel Last Lovers where author William Wharton writes that “perhaps sometimes it is best to be blind, so one can see the way things really are, and not be blinded by the way they look.”

 The climax of this encounter is the beautiful question that Jesus asks to Bartimaeus: “What do you want me to do for you?” This question animates our work with vision teams as we explore together what it means to have the ability of Bartimaeus to see (discern) with one’s heart “Jesus of Nazareth” as he passes by in unexpected people and surprising places. First, the presence of the Divine must be discerned and then one needs to exercise the courage to not let the sacred moment pass by without hearing one’s personal “beautiful question” from the lips of Jesus. It is the art of knowing how to see.

Leonard Sweet, in his book entitled Summoned to Lead, described an ad campaign called, “Leonardo de Vinci: The Art of Seeing.” It centered on da Vinci’s philosophy, summed up in two words: Saper Vedere, or “knowing how to see.” As a scientist, philosopher, inventor, and artist, da Vinci enlisted the concept of Saper Vedere to engage the world around him. To him, life was measured by one’s ability to see correctly. He described the almost mystical process of artists not simply painting what they see as much as their ability to see what they paint.

 Too often, we want to move into mission without saper vedere (before “knowing how to see”) and in doing so we cause more problems than we solve while, at the same time, completely missing the beautiful question rolling off the lips of the Master speaking through very unexpected people in very surprising places.

Joel Van Dyke is the Director of Estrategia de Transformacion, CTM in Latin America.

This article was first published as a Word from Below email on July 19, 2011.  To receive the weekly Word from Below by email, click here.)