For the past two weeks that we have been visiting Hope House, a place of peace and rest for those needing a space of healing. People with aids, cancer, TB, and anything in need of time away just to be fully healthy and healed.
Every morning we leave our house at 7:30-7:45 to arrive there at 8 am to start our normal visits and time to build relationships with the patients here. It's been very good and such a blessing. It's also been healing for me.
I wrote a blog about 10 days ago on Valentine's Day to post whenever I could get internet (Read it here). It made me dwell a lot on the past and a lot on things that shouldn't be taken up my mind space.
But it did.
I felt like I was in a pressure cooker. Everything kept bringing me back to past memories, or at least it felt like it. Not like the major things that happened, or the major milestones. They were all nit picking little memories.
So little and mundane, but they were nagging me.
In all of it though, I knew God was asking me to let the little memories go. I had surrenedered the big painful things, but I was holding on to little bits and pieces that my heart could keep.
Through these talks with God and through the memories, I was still being asked to do ministry.
God was still asking me to try to be present at Hope House.
It was so hard, but what I found is that being present in what God is doing helps with letting go. I found that I could in fact minister while being ministered to.
At Hope House, I usually find myself spending most of my time with a 19 year old young woman named Thetiwi. When I first met her, I thought she couldn't be over 10 years old because she is so tiny and she doesn't speak much. Her mother told us she suffers from epilepsy.
Some of us girls usually sit with here and talk to her, she usually doesn't respond, but we still ask her questions. A lot of times we end up dancing around and trying to make her laugh and smile because that girl's smile is amazing. You can't help but laugh when she does, it's just not possible.
Through my time with her, God has been teaching me that we all have broken hearts. We all have broken situation.
Thetiwi's mom is taking care of her while three of her boys are at home taking care of themselves. Her husband died six years ago. But everytime we encounter them, they smile and laugh. They are living their life and enjoying it even when their past gives them reason to be so desolate and depressed.
God is also teaching me that its okay to laugh, enjoy life and still have a broken heart and broken past. It's okay, because when I surrender the pain of the past for the joy of today, He is present and willing to help me give Him the big and even little things.
Broken hearts don't mean broken lives.
Broken hearts mean a place of surrender to God! A place of joy and a place of laughter!
(L to R Top: Me, Morgan. L to R Bottom: Jess and Thetiwi.)
