Even writing “1999” seems so archaic, like some long-lost era represented in signs and figures we barely now recognize. But I remember it well; it’s when I met my friend and sister in Christ, Lupita Rocha, who is the person I admire more than anyone I’ve ever met.
Lupita, at the time, was director of a small Bible college in Torreon, Coahuila, a state in north-central Mexico where her denomination, the Evangelical Methodist Church, had benefited from her work as a pastor, preacher, and teacher before and at times during her 15-year tenure at the college, the Bible Institute of Life and Truth. The EMC has a network of small churches in Chihuahua, Coahuila, San Luis Potosi, and Durango; I’ve preached in one in Durango, and she’s pastored and counseled several. Lupita is a gifted teacher, preacher, musician and church planter whose work in Spain, where she’s been the last few years, has been set aside now for her to return to Chihuahua to care for her elderly father. Some of you may know that Ciudad Juarez, where her father lives in one of its poorest barrios, is the most dangerous city on earth for women — hundreds have been killed in the last decade, mostly single women, like Lupita, but who were caught in a backdrop of a drug cartel frenzy of violence that keeps police distracted, even when it became clear that one or more serial killers of women was operating in the midst of the chaos. She arrives home this week, and I ask your prayers for safety.
But in December 1999, she was visiting Duvall, Washington, to see her old friend and ministry partner Ferol Elam, with whom I pastored a Spanish-language church sponsored by the denomination. Lupita and I hit it off, and I came to understand that Lupita doesn’t take vacations — she visits new areas to evangelize, and my town of Monroe, Washington, was where we focused. We spent two weeks together; the length of our friendship mirrors now the duration of my ministry work in the Monroe area. I wish there had been more than a one-year overlap; in very many ways, I’d been waiting for a Lupita in my work for years. She felt the same.
So we were making the rounds, visiting, drinking NesCafe, eating, and answering Bible questions. We were at Santos’ apartment one Saturday, one of hundreds of gray, drab two-bedroom units in a complex filled with people like him — undocumented immigrants working at the factories to support wife and kids here and parents and other family back home. Santos*, whose name means “saint” or “holy,” was pretty much without formal education, but he had an abundance of street smarts and ambition; his ability to rent an apartment came from his finding a job at something other than a dairy, and he was determined never to lose his home. He was a bit of a ne’er do well in his downtime, a bit more like Danny Bonaduce than anyone I’ve met, but he had a kind heart and adored his children, and we were friends. Still, his aversion to religious things was something I had not quite understood — probably because he was too goofy, too jovial, to ever mention anything as serious as that.
His wife was working at her Taco Bell job the day Lupita and I came. I would love to think that he only put up the calendar of nude women when his wife and kids were out of the house, but I’m guessing not. And so there it was, an 11 X 16 paean to the graceless, brassy nudity that separates pornography from the simply erotic and the leeringly objectified from the frankness of art. In the economy of Santos’ messy kitchen — Leonora had obviously been at work quite awhile — the placement of available seating meant that Lupita was situated right under La Senorita Diciembre, as if The Brassy, Hopeless One could read the New Testament over Lupita’s navy-blazered shoulders. I tried in vain to switch seats, but there really wasn’t a resolution — either Lupita faced the calendar, or Santos faced Lupita under the calendar. Either way, this Gospel presentation was going to take place under what fans of The World According To Garp would recognize as a WSB, a pornographic term that means something a little more than “La Senorita Really Should Have Kept Her Legs Crossed.”
I don’t remember how Santos reacted to our discussion of the Gospel or our assurance that we weren’t there to take him FROM his vague Catholicism, but TOWARD the living Christ. I don’t know how his life has turned out; even on my recent trip back to Monroe, I only got to see a couple of my old friends, and he wasn’t one of them. I have every assurance that he’s working hard, providing for his family, and, sadly, that his beautiful son Teodoro was harmed by the pornography as much as, albeit differently, Santos’ wife and daughters.
But I do remember — and will never forget — the cold, dreary December Saturday more than a decade ago when I saw the gifts of the Holy Spirit made evident under even the most glaringly sinful of circumstances. I saw grace and truth poured out from the most God-gifted woman I know to a man who in every way embodied what the Word calls “the least of these.” The irony of seeing a picture of a despised and desperate woman, posing for money and for the pleasure of men, hanging above a poor woman working and living for the pleasure of her Lord, is something that pierced my heart. I saw dignity like I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since in the face of my dear Lupita, obedient unto death and gracious in the midst of humiliation and ugliness she’d never encountered, steadfast in her determination to let this man Santos know that Un Santo Dios cherished him.
Of course it was uncomfortable. And there are some of my readers who think that she and I had no business teaching a man, pastoring churches, or leading mixed-gender studies and services. But the work of the Spirit, I think, is most often seen in the uncomfortable and unexpected, and it will survive the petty hermeneutic that seeks to chain it. As I write this, I fear for Lupita as she moves back to Juarez. In God’s sovereignty, she could die there. And I don’t know how I would survive such a loss, except in knowing that the Spirit worked fully in her, and for a couple of weeks in December and in two or three visits together since, I’ve been blessed to see it.
*Except for Santos’, all other names have been changed