Mustard Seeds

Reading Suggestion: to understand today’s post, it will be helpful to first read yesterday’s.

Enroute to a youth Bible study in Mateares with Carl Most, we stop for Nelson.

He is waiting on crutches.

Several months ago, he outran a gang-member attacker wielding a machete, but his friend did not.

When Nelson ran back to help his friend, a machete blow nearly severed Nelson’s leg. Physicians later finished the job.

He has had a week of ups and downs, he tells Carl, adjusting to the loss.

This Sunday evening, the eight former members of La Tufalera (The Stench) study Romans 12: “We are all part of the same body.”

As the evening concludes they plan at next meeting to place a plaque on the graveside of a group member killed last August.

When we return Nelson home, his mother asks a favor. Nelson’s father, kidneys ailing from twelve years of toxic-fume employment, is in pain. Can we take him to the clinic?

Of course. 


The father rides in the front seat, his wife in the open pickup bed. Weak-voiced, he says he has been in pain for dos dias (two days).

The clinic blurs as I resist tears. Then I succumb.

I remember that Jesus, too, wept.

I wonder: 

Are tears—both His and mine—the seeds for a "theology of suffering?"