If Jesus preached in New York City what he preached in Galilee, we’d lay him in his grave again.

Woody Guthrie

Living in a border town as volatile and spotlighted as the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez border will certainly challenge one’s worldview. It has flipped mine upside down. For example, try explaining the $7 million a mile border-fence, the iron cage dividing extravagance from abject poverty, to a people who have been suppressed by injustice, raped by world governments including their own, spit on and utterly demeaned by humanity. Or try justifying the meager wages, tossed from Fortune 500 companies like bread crumbs to pigeons, to my neighbors who work in the toilsome crucibles called maquiladoras. NAFTA was supposedly cooked-up to offer hope, but looking through the eyes of my new friends it seems it has only stolen livelihoods and offered shattered dreams.

There have been more arrests of social activists in this city than Narcos. My Mexican sisters are still being plucked off of the streets of Juarez, raped, cut to piece, discarded. Over 20 this year. Their innocent voices continue to cry out from the blood stained desert sand. The murders go unsolved.

Living on this side of the fence just might flip your worldview upside down too. But Juarez is fighting for hope.

Love for Juarez.

When I think about how deeply my heart has sunk into the desert sand, I laugh. I was swept away from the mountains, from friends, from community, from a lot of good stuff, only to land in the desert and begin to truly savor life. But it’s not like I have this thing figured out. I am simply here tilling away at the sand, warming up to a woeful city and falling in love with a tenacious people. This desert has scoured my spirit, revealing the marrow of life. Ironically, in a city plauged by death and fear, I have learned more than ever before about life, hope, peace, justice and love.

In a season where the world is being picked apart by war, pandemics, poverty, economic and ecologic depletion and fear, I see a movement of truth and love gathering in strength. And although the church in the United States has been lying dormant in her comfortable bed, she is waking. Justice has the upper hand. The song of hope and freedom is being sung around the world. Despite our differences, our hands are reaching through the fences of life, we’re uniting.

“We need to build justice, not walls!” – Pastor Kim Erno

I shot this photo in the square in downtown Juarez on April 16th, 2009.