This is a reflection on my processing through one of the simulations we went went through.
Marketplace Meal
One scenario was a real-life simulation of an open air marketplace that we will experience overseas. We had to haggle prices for food, for that was how we got our evening meal that day.
Like I said, it was very real. They even had beggars sitting in the street dressed in ragged old clothes, dirty with sores. Well, I did what and good old American missionary would do…ignore them. I mean, everybody knows having the rich white American throw out money or food isn’t always the best overseas missionary practice. And after all, that’s what you do, right? If you don’t want to be bothered by the homeless woman on the street, you ignore her, just like you ignore those annoying kiosk merchants in the middle of any shopping mall…just don’t make eye contact, or even look at them, and just keep walking.
But after I had successfully bartered for my food and was safely eating in off to the side, I scanned across the scene, and that’s when it happened–that’s when my eyes fell upon that beggar whom I had tried so desperately to ignore.
I didn’t have much time to process it all that day, but the next day I went off for a walk in the woods on my own, and my heart began to break. I started to cry, to weep, over that beggar, to to earnestly petition God.
You see, that’s when it hit me. That’s when I realized that right now, RIGHT NOW, there is a beggar on the streets somewhere in this world (and not just one, but a numerous many all over the world). They are literally starving to death, covered in sores, bleeding, broken, writhing in pain, the likes of which I have never seen before. No one dare go near them, let alone touch them, show them some form of loving affection and care.
But sadly unlike so many others, this isn’t just words on a screen for me, or an image in a magazine–I will be confronted with this scene, with this scenario, with this person, in my life.
That’s when the tears of compassion and love started flooding my eyes and flowing down my cheeks. That’s when I started to cry out to God to intervene. For I do not know what I am going to do, how I am going to react when confronted with this reality. But my cry is that God intervene. That somehow He heal, He renew, He restore. That somehow His love shine through, His care and compassion embrace that person–His creation, His image-bearer–on the streets. And somehow, if He allow it, that the Savior that I know so personally, allow me that opportunity to reach out to that person. To touch them, to embrace them, to love them, to speak the Truth of God into their lives–that they have a Heavenly Father who loves them.
I do not know what I am going to do, I just pray God give me the words to speak and shows me the actions to take.
