Yesterday, I (Dave) went for a walk in the community with my friend Maarten which we do 3 afternoons a week as part of our missionary work here. It was really a day of spending time with the rejected.
In Brazil, there are a lot of people who would not enter a favela because of the stories they hear and the type of people who live in such places. Even Christians from "richer" churches or backgrounds would not want to enter here or associate with these people so, to start with, favelados (people from a favela) are rejected by others from their own country. However, within the favela, there are also those who are rejected by their fellow favelados. For example, the drunk old men who sit in groups semi-conscious in the streets. The drug addicts, the "crazy people" - often people who have gone mad through too much alcohol or too many drugs or extreme tragedy and similar.
So, we started our walk with a visit to our crippled friend and we planned to take him to a school next week for him to look round and see what he thinks. Next we saw some children playing in some rubbish. They said that they were trying to find metal to sell so that they could buy some bread for their family but, to me, it looked like they were playing and having a lot of fun, discovering cool rejected items which could be used for whatever their imagination allowed.
After that, we spent some time with a group of drunk men (and 1 woman) who were really grateful that we talked to them because they said that no-one cares about them - we even got some strange looks from people who seemed like they thought that we were crazy associating ourselves with such people. 2 of them asked about going to a rehab house for alcoholics and we did not even mention it to them.
I love people like them and I believe that they are really precious in the sight of God because he died for such as these.....the poor, lame, lonely, blind, rejected.....these are the people invited to the banquet....and I reckon they´ll have the best seats!!