Yesterday was the day. The day that I knew would come but I dreaded having to face.
It started out great. We got up early and went to our first day of ministry. We have several different ministries that we’ll be doing while we’re here. We will be working in prisons, working with sex trafficking victims, and yesterday, we started our ministry of working with drug addicts at a rehab center. In the morning we walked the two miles to the center and met Tani. Tani is the man who runs the center, and he literally radiates the love of the Father. He is an ex-addict who started this center himself to help others recover, and hopefully find Jesus in the process. He wakes up every morning and goes to to center, then waits to see if anyone comes for the day. He’s there every day, and says that he will be there “until the last man leaves”.
No one came for a while, the he got a call about about someone new who was going to come. He went and picked him up then brought him back to the center. His name was Chris. He’s a 20 year old Albanian who is just now getting into rehab, and you could tell that he’s still in the withdrawal process. My heart immediately broke for him. You could tell that he was surrounded by so much darkness, and just wanted to find the light. Luckily we had a translator there, so we talked with him a little, but ended up just playing cards for a while. We had a blast. If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that laughing is universal. You don’t need to speak the same language for that 🙂 We took him to lunch afterwards, and invited him to meet us that night to climb the pyramid in the center of the city.
Oddly enough, this blog isn’t about Chris though. It’s not even about someone I met, or someone I spoke to. It’s about someone who no one but my team noticed.
On our walk to the city center, we saw all sorts of street vendors, street dogs, and homeless adults. Then there she was. A little girl. All alone. Begging for change.
She was dirty, had no shoes, and couldn’t have been more than 10 years old. I thought I knew what a broken heart felt like before, but in that moment I experienced a pain that I never thought was possible. No one looked her in the eye, no one saw her, and no one’s heart went out to her. Every single person just walked right past her. Why wasn’t anyone crying for this girl? Why wasn’t anyone picking her up and putting shoes on her. Why was no one holding her in their arms and reading her a story?
I couldn’t handle the pain as I kept walking and tried my hardest to keep it in, but I couldn’t anymore. I broke down. There I was in the middle of a Albanian street, weeping. I was crying for a girl who probably doesn’t even think she’s worth anyone’s tears. In that moment though, the Lord said to me, “Now you see what I see, and now you know why I sent you.” Someone needed to cry for her. Someone needed to notice her and pray for her. That someone was me.
You see movies and documentaries about homeless children, but when you actually see them in front of you, there are no words to describe it. Her eyes were empty, and she couldn’t even lift her head up to look at the people walking by. I’ll never know this girl and she’ll never know me, but she changed my life.
The thought of my heart feeling that way over and over and over for eleven months was too much to handle. But how selfish of me is that. God feels that pain every single day, and I couldn’t even handle it for one? No, I can. I can and I will, because this is what He has asked me to do, and it is in Him that I find my strength.
“Break my heart for what breaks yours”. They told us a training camp that it was a dangerous prayer to pray, but I did it anyway, and God delivered. Well that will continue to be my prayer. I pray that my heart breaks just as much if not more every time I see injustice. Every time I see a man, woman, or child in pain, my heart will break. I pray that my heart never becomes hardened and that I will fight for the rest of my life for the ones that no one notices.
This is just the beginning.
