I used to walk down an old country road by my house, even in winter it was beautiful. The freshly melted snow revealed the golden fields it had been concealing, and patches of green grass struggled to hold onto it's color through the cold winter months. Rolling hills and naked trees were all around, the colors of the earth inspired me. I would walk until I reached the creek and then sit on the guard rail gazing at the scenery like a movie screen, and dream. I would dream about the world beyond the borders of my country. A world so full of mystery, adventure, and beauty. It was hard to imagine a world that has never known the kind of peace I would feel sitting there surrounded by the quiet beauty of the earth.
I remember the first time I stepped foot on foreign soil. I was 19 and had just finished my freshman year of college. I was young and the world was still full of romance. I had never seen people living under tarps before. My eyes had never swam in such a sea of poverty the way they did the first time I saw how the majority of people in India live. My eyes were opened to the reality that people live and die everyday underneath that sea of tarps without food, water, or hope.
The next summer I was sitting on a bus heading into the West Bank of Israel, known as Palestine. Staring out the window I saw the physical poverty, staring at the faces on the streets my spirit saw the spiritual poverty of oppression and hopelessness. The friends I spent the summer building relationships with in the West Bank saw nothing around them but a cage. They didn't know how to dream because they had lost hope.
I have been traveling for 8 months now, i'm tired. I'm actually writing this from a bouncy bus that has just crossed the border from Uganda into Kenya. Having to evacuate the country of Uganda because of an outbreak of a deadly virus known as Ebola, is just another reason why I'm tired. Sometimes I feel like the whole world is a broken bone, and i'm staring at it not knowing what to do. I have to remind myself that i'm not the doctor –God is. But what do I do when I see the disease and poverty in Africa, when I read about the conflict happening in Syria, when I learn that the 15 year old girl that I poured my heart into in El Salvador is pregnant, when I remember those girls in the Ukraine who just need someone to pour into them, when I can't get the faces of those orphan boys on the day I left India 3 years ago out of my head, when I still see the sad eyes of my Palestinian friends in pictures on facebook?
I have been afraid of brokenness. I have been afraid to feel the same thing I see in the world. I always had a feeling that God was going to break me in Africa and I feared that something awful was going to have to happen like getting really sick –i'm pretty sure God understands how much I hate being sick. I know that brokenness leads to dependency on Him and that it's not a bad thing, still, however, the word brokenness doesn't sound very fun. I never would have guessed it would be learning that Mabill was pregnant. When she told me the news my heart sank. My mind flashed back to my last night in El Salvador 6 months ago, sitting with her on the church floor, crying with her as she encountered the love of God that night. I thought about all our skype conversations in Spanish while I was in Europe the following 2 months. I remembered all the quick messages I sent her from unstable African Internet and all the countless prayers I had sent up for her over the months. I began to doubt my ability to help anyone. Sitting on a couch overlooking the Nile River, surrounded by Europeans getting drunk, and the speakers pumping out hip hop music, I sat there and wrote things in my journal like, "What happens when you do your best and it's still not enough, at what point do you stop trying?" I began to really see how big the worlds problems are and how little I am.
"What do I do God when I feel like I can't do anything? When I feel my heart pulled in so many different directions? When I see the overwhelming amount of need in the world?"
"You lean on Me."
I've always known that I can't do it all in my own strength, but that night for the first time I felt like I couldn't do anything in my own strength. I can't change the world, but the one living inside of me can. He told me that in this world I would have trouble, that I would see things that would break my heart, that I would become angry at all the injustice, but he also said not to lose hope, to take heart, because He has overcome the world.
So what I will do is…
Give love to the ones who don't know how to love at all.
Give hope to the ones who have no hope at all.
Stand up for the ones who can't stand at all.
Mabill and I in El Salvador
The girls in Ukraine that I reached out to.
I chased after Mario many times to get him to stop doing drugs. (Honduras).
Praying for healing and salvation in a villiage in Tanzania.
The Nile River in Uganda
Rope Swinging into the Nile.
