When God sends the enemy into your house

David Morrow

Then I went to El Salvador, a country at war, where enemies seemed to abound. Most of the war's victims were civilians. Before beginning our Mennonite Central Committee assignment, my wife Irene and I read about the army's record of torture, assassination and massacre, and we decided who our enemy would be--the army.

While we never suffered the army's repression as our Salvadorean neighbours did, we did experience minor abuse. The day we moved into our home in the little town of Sesori, we found a platoon of soldiers in our backyard. Throughout our four years there, soldiers were in and around our house. At night, they'd lie outside singing, swearing and smoking marijuana--a gang of stoned teenagers with automatic weapons.

The army was understandably suspicious of us. What were a couple of gringos with a baby doing in the middle of a war zone? We could only be guerrillas or guerrilla sympathizers, so they repeatedly stopped and questioned us. Occasionally they came to our house to investigate.

One afternoon when Irene and baby Nathan were alone in the house, a knock came. It was a sergeant and a private, sent by their colonel. They asked the usual: "Who are you? For whom do you work? Do you ever go into the countryside?"

Irene replied in the cool, brusque manner with which we usually addressed soldiers.

Then Nathan awakened from his nap. "Que chulo!" (How cute!) the soldiers exclaimed. There were no more questions. They spent the rest of their visit oohing and aahing over Nathan--it was a common reaction, but Irene hadn't expected the normal human response to a baby from soldiers. Quite frankly, it irritated her. Their reaction contradicted her image of soldiers as brutes incapable of warmth, affection or tenderness. The prime strategy in war is to dehumanize the enemy--and that is what both she and I had done. Theologically we were pacifists, but psychologically we had become participants in war.

El Salvador was still at war when we returned to the United States in 1990. We had grown personally and spiritually, we had learned much from Salvadorean Christians about faith amid suffering, but the war had left within us a residue of anger and bitterness at the violence and injustice.

Back in the US, we began working with refugees in Harlingen, Texas under Mennonite Board of Missions. One Sunday, we were invited to give a presentation on El Salvador at a Mennonite church in Brownsville, Texas. After the service, a friend introduced Irene to a Salvadorean man. Irene explained where we had lived in El Salvador.

"I know," he said. "I remember you. You lived in the house next to the Baptist church. You had a cute little boy you'd push around town in a little wooden cart. I used to be a sergeant in the army. I came to your house one day."

This was the soldier who had cooed over Nathan four years earlier, the soldier we had dismissed as our enemy--and God's. His name, which Irene hadn't bothered to find out, was Doroteo.

That evening, Doroteo phoned. His political aslylum hearing was coming up. Could I translate for him?

"Can't someone else do it?" I asked.

No, no one else could.

"I really can't translate for you without first hearing your story," I protested.

He would be happy to meet with me. He would come to my house--tomorrow.

This encounter with Doroteo was strange and unsettling. I didn't want him in our house. I felt like Ananias when the Lord told him to go and meet Saul: No, Lord! I know this man's past! He's a man of violence!

Doroteo had indeed been a man of violence. His battalion had a horrible record of atrocities. The husband of one of our neighbours in Sesori had been murdered by members of this battalion, his body dumped down a well.

The next morning, Doroteo told me his story. He had joined the military in 1980, and become a member of one of the elite special forces battalions trained by the US military. Whenever his battalion was in the Sesori area, Doroteo's job was to spy on us. He staked out our house, watched our movements, investigated what we were doing. Doroteo was convinced we were affiliated with the guerrillas, and had reported this to his commander. After learning Irene was a nurse, Doroteo presumed we were health workers supporting a clinic that treated wounded guerrillas. In actuality, Irene trained church health promoters and worked in a small rural pharmacy.

In 1989, Doroteo was critically wounded in a battle. During his months of convalescence, he decided to get out of the army. He asked three times to be relieved of his duties; three time he was denied. Clearly his superiors didn't want him to leave the army--alive. He knew too much.

Doroteo feared that when he returned to the battlefield, the army would find a way for him to be killed, so he deserted. This was not out of Christian conviction--Doroteo was not a Christian. In addition to the violence in which he had taken part, Doroteo had lived a life of drugs, alcohol and carousing. Yet within him there was a desire to change, and a recognition that only God could do the changing.

After a six-month journey through Mexico, Doroteo crossed the Rio Grande into Brownsville, where he met Irma and Juan Arambaru of the Mennonite church. They invited him to services. He stopped drinking and doing drugs, and committed his life to Christ. He even experienced a call to the ministry.

Something about Doroteo's story, something about his humble manner, rang true. Not only did I agree to translate for his asylum hearing, but Irene and I also began to visit with him at church. We were privileged to attend his baptism--in January in the Gulf of Mexico.

About that time, I decided to search for a pastorate in the Mennonite church. As a Presbyterian, I had never received believer's baptism, although my rebirth in Christ had occurred 15 years earlier. Our pastor baptized me at the same beach where Doroteo had been baptized six months earlier.

Later that year, I accepted a call to pastor Warden (Wash.) Mennonite Church. About the same time, Doroteo moved to Kansas to study at the Anabaptist Biblical Institute. We kept in touch, and several times Doroteo said he might like to move to Washington. We doubted he would ever really do so.

Then, in the summer of 1996, the phone rang early one Sunday morning. It was Doroteo, calling from a pay phone six blocks away. He had finally decided to move to Washington, and asked if he could stay with us for a while.

Over the following days, Irene and I spent hours with Doroteo, reminiscing about El Salvador and hearing more of his story. Those conversations helped Irene find healing for much of the residual bitterness from our El Salvador years, and I began to understand why Doroteo kept reappearing in my life. God was giving me repeated opportunities to love my enemy as God loved me. As Irene put it, "God has sent the enemy to our house." God sent him to our house in El Salvador, in Texas and in Washington. God keeps sending the enemy to our house until we learn to love him.

Two years have passed. Doroteo moved to his own place about a year ago, and remains my friend. He has started a Hispanic congregation at our church.

As for me, I still feel like Ananias. But now I feel like Ananias when he met Saul and greeted him with the words, "Brother!" Ananias had learned what I now have learned. There are many biblical reasons to love my enemy, but perhaps the most simple is that my enemy may one day be my brother.

This article was distributed in October, 1997 by Mennonite Central Committee.

Return to the M.B.Herald Vol. 37, No. 20 Home Page