Just over 3,900, but I don’t consider this to be a numbers game, so let me take you to the meat of the dish.
Last month was spent at an orphanage about twenty minutes outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand. Agape, home to over 100 incredible kids, provides a place of refuge and love for children affected by HIV/AIDS. Our Canadian hosts this month were absolutely phenomenal! Roy and Avis founded this orphanage 20 years ago and their story is riveting.
They have what they call an “impact room” on campus. On the walls of this room are pictures that capture the memories of this remarkable place. The beautiful brokenness of it all brought me to tears.
Back during the heat of the Cambodian genocide, Avis had gone over as a missionary to Thailand to assist in an orphanage at one of the refugee camps set up there. She told the story of how she’d gone up to an abandoned room where they’d put the HIV positive kids and there found a girl with a sign above her reading, “leave her to die.” Avis, one of the most devoted, dedicated, passionate, and loving women I’ve ever met, took this as a challenge. Knowing that what the child really needed was just a hand of love to reach out and touch her, she ended up taking the girl against all governmental restrictions.
Long story short, after the back and forth process of legalizing the adoption, Nikki officially became her daughter, and Avis became the first person in Thailand to ever adopt an HIV positive child. This ignited the unquenchable fire in her heart to move to Thailand with her husband where they opened up their home to HIV/AIDS positive children. As God continued to drop kids in their lap, they knew they had to expand. Through a miraculous fundraising story they now have this incredible campus for these kids to call home.
So that leads us to my part of the story. As many of you know, Hope and I’s journey to Ethiopia a little over a year and a half ago rocked my world. Throughout the Race, and especially the times I find myself back at an orphanage, I have to check myself. The comparison game is a crippling, exhausting, and never-ending grudge match. Far to many times, and often without even knowing it, I’ve put on the jersey and walked out into this arena, only to find myself seconds later face down in the dirt.
Game over.
Since most of you my readers find yourself not in proximity to the equator, consider with me this analogy. Think about the seasons of the year. Year after year there’s a cycle, winter, spring, summer, and fall, but each year the cycles different and unique in how it’s felt, seen, and experienced. So it is with life, year after year we go through and experience different and unique seasons and times of our lives, and that’s exactly how it was intended to be.
God illuminated a remarkable truth to me this past month, one that’d been there just dormant in a sense. There is a proper place and purpose for everything. Everything, I also discovered, literally means everything! I believe originality, not replication, is the Authors plan. I’m done robbing the Creator of His creativity.
Now let me address the title of this blog for you all. Hint: It’s extremely literal.
Agape acquired a cement block making machine a few months ago, so we were the first ones to try our hands at the new equipment. Our days consisted not so much with playing with the orphans or teaching them, but rather with sculpting hundreds and hundreds of cement blocks, one right after the other. It was Manisty month round two, so we had the team to get some serious work done, the only questioning factor was our mentality.
“Do small things with great love.” (Mother Teresa)
This profound yet simple statement is one of my sister and brother in law’s favorite, engraved in wood at their wedding. To love like this is a lifestyle, not just a style that is in one season and out the other.
So we made the decision, do small things, i.e. build blocks, with great love. Yes, this definitely wasn’t the most glamorous ministry or our ideal plan, but it was no doubt His ideal plan. The lessons He taught, the truths He instilled in me, and the fire He ignited in me during those days, priceless.
It reminds me of something I learned back at Training Camp. God gives us the choice, opt in or opt out. Regardless of what we choose our status within His agape love never changes, that’s the unfathomable greatness of His reality. What does change, however, is the level of fullness we get to experience in and with Him.
I was talking with one of my squadmates the other night and she told me how God’s holding out His Hand. Sure He’ll extend it again if I don’t grab hold now, but why wait? Why miss out on a second of the abundant life He’s calling me into?
Before I leave you I want to share with you something that’s helped me truly grasp this concept of abundance. When God promises us abundance He doesn’t mean a mansion on a hill or happiness in a pill. Externals actually have little or nothing to do with what He’s getting at here. The meat of abundance is this: internal ignition of the fruit of the Spirit.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. (Gal. 5:22-23)
Now meditate with me on that. The impact of living out what we as Christians already have living inside us through the Holy Spirit is absolutely life and world altering; its abundance. As the pastor at the church we attended in Chiang Mai put it, “This is the fruit of the Holy Spirit living in you! The problem with most Christians today is that we’re trying to hard to get what we already have. Being a Christian isn’t about trying to do these things, it’s about believing you already have these things.”
