I am in a cozy little coffee shop curled up in a big, soft chair sipping a hot chai latte listening to music that has English lyrics and is quiet enough that if you are concentrating on something you don’t notice it is playing. It is cold outside, but I am perfectly warm in my clean jeans, sweater and boots. The barista picks up a pumpkin cream cheese muffin on the counter and brings it over to me.
I am sitting at the table in Kothe, Nepal. I can hear the sound of the river below and the sound of a thousand insects in the jungle outside our house, our house that is one room and has no window panes on the windows. We have water to drink and I am eating a package of coconut cookies I bought from the store on the road. If the breeze is blowing just right I can smell the squatty potties that the family of 10 and the 6 of us share. I don’t quite remember the last time I washed the clothes that I am wearing, but they passed the smell test that I use to determine if I can get another day’s worth out of them. If I go outside, I start sweating immediately and I have curry and rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Yes, sometimes I wish I could escape when I am in a bus full of Africans where we sit 3 or 4 to a seat or when music is blasted until 3 in the morning and starts back up again at 6. Sometimes I dream of America when I find a spider in the bathroom that is bigger than my hand or when we don’t have electricity or running water and I think I might go mad if I can’t escape to the world of headphones because my iPod is dead.
Oh, yes. It was all worth it. I would give it all up again in a second. I have not lived in America for nearly 10 full months now. Yes, I miss it. It is easy. It is comfortable.
This life is often hard and we live off of a lot less. But you know what you realize when you give things up?
You realize that you don’t really need them anyway.
God provided my food every day, my daily bread. He did in America and He does it here. Just because I have a job and buy my food at a grocery store myself where there are aisles and aisles of food doesn’t mean it is any less from God than when I live in a one-room house in a third-world country where rice is its own food group. I still have everything I need.
And since I gave up everything I don’t need I am free to give what I have…The things that God has given me. The things that last.
For the price of 17 muffins we were able to feed over 100 street kids in Tanzania. The coke I shared with a prostitute in Thailand is so much more valuable than a latte at Starbucks. I have dirty clothes, but they are dirty because I hug dirty children who live in mud huts, or doorways, or garbage dumps. I don’t have electricity because I live in a small mountain village in Nepal where people have to hike mountains for over 2 hours just to get to church. I don’t have my own space because I share a tent in a small room with some of the best friends I will ever have who stay up late talking about real things that matter or silly things that don’t matter at all.
My life is hard sometimes, but more than worth everything I left behind. The things I have done and seen on this trip with stay with me in this life and then stay with me into eternity.
