Next month Carlos Aguilera will run a marathon in Lebanon to raise money to help Syrian Christians living in refugee camps, one of a group of Australians running for the cause. DAVID ADAMS talks to him about why…
Carlos Aguilera says he is “not a runner”. Next month, however, he’ll undertake a marathon in the Middle East to help raise funds for the aid of Christian Syrian refugees, having previously run a 60 kilometre ultramarathon for the same cause in 2015.
“This will be my fourth marathon,” the 35-year-old says. “But I only started long distance running because of the trip in 2015…So when I say I’m not a runner, I don’t run for the love of running, I only run because I use something as trivial as running to help other people. I’m passionate about helping people that are suffering, I’m not a passionate runner.”
RUNNING WITH A PASSION: Carlos Aguilera in Jordan in 2015, taken about 25 kilometres into a 60 kilomtre ultramarathon. PICTURE: Supplied.
“I learnt about what was going on for people of the Christian faith in the Middle East and just decided to do something about it.”
– Carlos Aguilera
Mr Aguilera is just one of six people going from Australia on the trip, known as a Muskathlon, which has attracted people from all over the world and is being organised by persecuted church support organisation Open Doors and global justice movement 4th Musketeer – others include uni students Justine Shapiro and Jamin Bennett, Brisbane business owner Lynda Utting, teacher Joyce Choucair, and Perth painter Peter Chapman.
They’re not all running the same distance – some are running a half marathon, others, like Mr Aguilera, a full marathon. But they are united in their purpose of raising money to help suffering Syrian Christians – each has committed to raising $10,000.
Mr Aguilera’s first trip to the Middle East – back in 2015 – came while he was still working for the Department of Education in Canberra (his current role with Open Doors Australia now has him managing relationships with the organisation’s “most passionate” supporters as well as being involved in organising trips like the one he’s undertaking next month).
“I learnt about what was going on for people of the Christian faith in the Middle East and just decided to do something about it,” he says. “I learnt one of the things you could do was partner with Open Doors and…go overseas to run an ultramarathon, for example, and whilst you do that you seek to fundraise to help people directly.”
Mr Aguilera says that among the key motivations for him making the 2015 trip – through which he raised some $19,000 to help Syrian Christians – was the idea that Christians, “just like me”, could not live out their faith freely.
“I really wrestled with that because in Australia, today, there’s nothing really stopping me from being a follower of Jesus. I don’t suffer for the privilege…” he says.
He was also struck by the fact that those who he saw suffering for their faith in Christ in the Middle East were “rejoicing” in it.
“That to me was a real challenge because for me, a lot of the time, in Australia, going to church feels like a chore…whereas I heard about people who would travel days to go to a meeting place to meet with other Christians.”
Then there’s the stories he’s heard of those who refused to recant their faith but, despite refusing to denounce Christ, would suffer anyway. “That really challenged me…how can people suffer but also that they would suffer willingly. I really wrestled with that faith. I thought that I was doing Christianity really well, actually – I would go to church regularly, reading the Bible frequently, praying – but I discovered this whole passion for Jesus. That’s something that really hit hard for me, to the point where I had to get on a plane and find out how it is that’s possible.”
Mr Aguilera says many colleagues at his government work thought he was “doing a really dumb thing” by going to such a dangerous place just to “experience this suffering”. “But,” he says of the people he encountered on the trip, “they taught me so many things.”
And yet Mr Aguilera’s family is no stranger to the hardships of persecution. He grew up in a Christian home in Chile during the regime of notorious military dictator Augusto Pinochet and says his grandfather, a Baptist pastor, had been forced pay a tax so people could come together and meet in his church – a fact which meant “a lot of the time there was no food on the table in his [grandfather’s] home”.
He moved to Australia when he was 10 and says, despite the fact that he had grown up in a family of devoted Christian, while he knew of Christ, he didn’t have a relationship with Him.
LOSS: A woman in a refugee camp for Syrians. PICTURE: Open Doors
That changed at the age of 18 when, thanks to his involvement in Boys’ Brigade, he was sent on a leadership development course which saw him spend several days in isolation in country Victoria. During that time he started reading the Bible and encountered Philippians 3:12 – “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me”, a verse which he says “blew my mind forever”.
“In an instant I had found forgiveness. It was something that I hadn’t thought that I actually needed or wanted in my life…[So] I got on my knees and I quite literally accepted the Lord in the wilderness in Victoria.”
Fifteen years later, it was the faith he found on that day which led Mr Aguilera to a refugee camp in Jordan. When he first entered the camps in 2015, he says that what struck him most about the people he met was the sense of loss they endured.
“The cost of following Jesus is massive. People have lost everything and the everything is really hard for us to understand because they’ve lost their careers, so they’ve lost their jobs and their income, they’ve lost their homes, they’ve lost every single possession, they’ve lost their direction in life that they’d worked so hard all their life to obtain…And so the cost of it is big and the atrocities [committed against people in Syria] are entirely different when you see them on the ground and when you hear firsthand on the ground what the atrocities look like.”
And yet, Mr Aguilera says that while those he met had no hope in bodies like the UN being able to resettle them, they continued to have “hope in Jesus”. “Which I really wrestle with – how do you have nothing, but you have Jesus? That’s really crazy to me.”
The Australian group, who will be in Lebanon from 13th to 20th May, and, as well as spending a day running, they’ll be visiting camps housing widowed women and orphaned children and running a one day sports camp. All the money they raise is going toward the provision of practical support – including food parcels – for Syrian refugees and they’ll also be taking with them hand-made crochet toys which are being created in fund-raising nights led by Mr Aguilera and Ms Shapiro, a crochet expert.
WHAT THEY LEFT BEHIND: The ruins of a playground in Syria. PICTURE: Open Doors
Mr Aguilera expects to again be challenged by what confronts them in the refugee camps they’re intending to visit.
He says that among the encounters which most impacted him during the 2015 trip was with a Syrian Christian woman who told him of the day followers of the so-called Islamic State came to her village.
They had lined up all the women and children on one side of the street and men on the other. The women were then asked whether they were a follower of the ‘Nazarene’, as Jesus is referred to, and then whether they were married. She answered yes to both and when asked to point out her husband had to then watch as the man questioning her walked over and shot her husband in the head, killing him.
“That’s a really, really crazy story which is a very common story but really struck me…[was] as I was leaving that refugee camp, I kind of broke protocol and I asked her what I could pray for her…and here I was thinking she was going to say ‘Pray for more food, pray for for clothing, pray that we get out of this camp. But she said none of that…” recalls Mr Aguilera.
“She said ‘Pray for ISIS [another acronym for IS] because no bomb will change their heart’. And that to me was an incredible wrestle, I didn’t know whether I was man enough do to that but I found myself muttering this prayer for ISIS, the men who killed her husband.”
Support pages for those going on the trip can be found here: Carlos Aguilera, Jamin Bennett, Peter Chapman, Joyce Choucair, Justine Shapiro, and Lynda Utting.
