For those of you who are unaware, on Wednesday, October 12, 2016, Chaplain Tim Blackmon was scheduled to speak at Wheaton College Chapel. The liturgy was on Exodus 32:1-14. The sermon would have likely related to it. However, on Tuesday October 11, the chaplain’s office sent out a campus wide email informing campus that Chaplain Blackmon had decided to not speak, but instead allowed the opportunity to have Maggie Gobran, known as “Mama Maggie” to the slums of Cairo speak. It was awesome.
Prior to the email, I had not heard of Mama Maggie, but the email made the event sound exciting. After singing and the scripture reading, the small woman in white who sat on the stage next to President Ryken was introduced with a short video clip about the garbage slums of Cairo, and about how seeing it had changed her and driven her to found the organization Stephen’s Children, a Christian organization dedicated to improving the lives of children in the slums and spreading the Gospel. It has been highly effective, so effective that Mama Maggie has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize eight times. Who were we at Wheaton College to suddenly have this amazing woman speak before us?
Then Mama Maggie got up to speak. She had a soft soothing motherly voice, and began with speaking of the bleakness and harshness of life for the children in the slums and included hope for as she said. One of her most memorable moments was when she spoke with a young girl who was clinging fiercely to an apple. When asked about it, the child said that she was saving it for her brother. This moment had touched Mama Maggie and prompted her to say, “We don’t choose where or when to be born. We don’t choose where or when to die, but we do choose either to be sinners or saints.” Mother Maggie made her choice and lived it out. She had chosen to be a hero, a hero for Christ immersed in Scripture.
She continued with anecdotes from her past and what brought her from being a professor at the American University in Cairo to being to a mother in the slums, and she talked of change that had taken place in Cairo while she worked. In her most impactful story, she recounted how a boy had injured his eye playing and his family could not afford medical treatment beyond basic first aid. Upon not receiving treatment, the father had said that Jesus would heal, and Jesus did by appearing and touching the kid’s eye.
In the West we suffer from an utter lack of miracle testimonies. If anyone gets up to share how God intervened and gave him or her a miracle in church, then it is usually a financial miracle. So and so was in great need of making ends meet, and a stranger presented him or her with a check with the right amount. As miraculous as these events are, they are incredibly easy to write off as coincidences. Healings are not coincidences. It was a reminder of God’s miraculous power and a reminder that there are still yet people in this world who live in a way of need of miracles, a practice that has vanished in the west. This is what we must remember in western Christianity.
Still, Mama Maggie’s stories could not beat her presence in chapel because even though she obviously is Christian, she is not what most of us a Wheaton are, a Protestant Evangelical. She is Coptic Orthodox. Neither does she work with people like the most of us, white middle class Americans. She works with poor, for the most part, non-white Egyptians. What all these people have in common is that they are the body of Christ. At places, like Wheaton, IL, it can be difficult to realize that the body of Christ is not mostly American and white. At Wheaton College, it can be difficult to realize that the body of Christ is not entirely Protestant Evangelical. Protestant Evangelicals do not have a monopoly on spreading the Gospel.
By standing at the pulpit and speaking, Mama Maggie shed light on to the rest of the world and began the necessary process of popping the Wheaton bubble.
If you would like to watch her chapel message click here.
