Rwanda is a place full of healing, hope and joy. I love that we get to meet such a variety of people every day. I love that my arms always smell like African children. I love that we can talk to orphans and widows, Catholics and Muslims, drug addicts and pastors.
However, Rwanda is also a place of much hurt, poverty, and depression. I was invited into a woman’s house the other day. She sat us down and asked us to pray for her husband who is in a refugee camp somewhere and she doesn’t know if she will ever see him again. All four of her children were killed in the genocide in 1994 and he is all she has left.
It is very easy to pity those around me, to look into their lives, so different from mine and feel extremely sorry for them. That is why God commanded us to pity our neighbors. He said to pity one another just as Christ pitied us.
But that is not true.
God did not pity us. He loved us.
Pity can build hospitals, feed someone a meal, buy school supplies.
Pity is a feeling. It is temporary. It is fleeting.
It is human.
So many times I have looked at someone and all I can see is their unfortunate life. If only they had money, or a family their life would be better.
But that is not true.
I know people who have money and a family and are more unhappy than the little girl I met yesterday on the street with no shoes and no one to pay her school fees.
Are we talking to these people just because they are poor? Just because we feel sorry for them? Just because they need something we can give them?
Love is a choice.
Love is what raises a child, what brings freedom to prostitutes, what heals broken hearts.
Jesus did not pity the prostitutes, the orphans or the widows. He loved them. It was His grace that saved us, not His charity.
We need to look through God’s eyes and see what He sees when He looks at these people.
He sees beauty in brokenness.
He sees a future in depression.
He sees hope in addiction.
He sees a love for His children that will never fail them.
Pity can change a life for a moment, but love is the only thing that can change a life for eternity.
A new commandment I give you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you must also love one another.
John 13:34
