WRECKED WITH COMPASSION
Stories worth telling are full of conflict. If you want to live one, pain is inevitable. Remember: compassion means to “suffer with.” If you’re trying to serve someone in need and it doesn’t hurt a little, you’re doing something wrong. Sure, it’s nice to lend a helping hand, but true compassion causes your heart to break-even at the moment you’re helping. It breaks for all the needs you’re not meeting, for everything else you could be doing. When you hold the dying in your arms, when you put a pair of shoes on someone’s bare feet, when you listen to a homeless person’s story-these things don’t feel good. They hurt. Which is what they’re supposed to do. They remind us of a world that is still broken, that still needs to be healed.
Goins, Jeff (2012-08-01). Wrecked: When a Broken World Slams into Your Comfortable Life (Kindle Location 776). Moody Publishers. Kindle Edition.
(BEFORE PICTURES OF PAUL) (AFTER PICTURES OF PAUL- PAUL IS ONLY 10 YEARS OLD)
When my team and I started the street kid ministry in Nakuru, Kenya, I thought it was going to feel good to give and that it was going to be so fulfilling. But what I experienced instead was brokenness. I would come to ministry every day with a full heart and then leave 3 house later feeling completely empty because I couldn’t do enough. The kids always wanted something or needed something. Every day I would leave the boys feeling more and more hurt because of how much love and compassion that I had for them.
( THE KIDS TRYING ON THEIR NEW SHOES)
Our last day of Street Ministry, we decided to use some of our extra money to buy the kids some new shoes and to try to meet some of the biggest needs they had. I left the house that morning thinking, “This is going to be such a life giving morning! We are going to be able to do so much and it’s going to be like Christmas!” I think it felt like Christmas to them, but to me it felt empty because I just gave what I had and wished I could be giving more… My thoughts were everywhere!
(PAUL, JOHN, AND DENNIS)
Because, yes, we just gave so much to these kids, but does it really matter? Because when I leave they are just going to go back to sniffing glue. They are still going to be street kids, and they are still going to have orphan hearts.
Where do you go from there? That takes me back to what pastor Ayub said to me in the living room one night. “Do what you can and Trust God to do the rest.” I have to trust that the Lord used us. I have to trust that those boys felt our love. I have to trust that we planted a seed in Nakuru and that those seeds are going to blossom! They are, after all, His children and maybe I will go back or maybe he will send someone else.
(THE BOYS AFTER GETTING NEW OUTFITS)
I guess this is what you get when you ask the Lord to break your heart for what breaks His. I get a heart for street kids- who have stolen my heart and who I can’t wait to see again! Through these boys I have found my calling. I don’t know when the Lord is going to take me back to Kenya, but I know that I will be ready when he calls me back home!
