Trading my agenda for a broken heart

“What are you doing right now that requires faith?” Hosanna asked us this morning during our team prayer time.

I wrote down the question in my journal. Then prayed for God’s eyes to see today, for a heart to set aside my own agenda and be open to His Spirit, for an expectation that the unexpected will happen and heaven will encounter earth.

We cleaned the church. We sat for an hour in the sanctuary waiting for a matatu (mini-bus) to pick us up. We ate lunch of samosas (deep-fried, meat-filled pastry triangles) and chips (aka French fries) in town.
Jo and Missy packed their extra fries to give to the kids we pass in the street on our way to the coffee shop.
I have to be honest. Usually I don’t even notice these kids. Usually I am so focused on my goal, my agenda, my destination, that I walk right by. Usually I don’t have eyes to see.

We left a bag of chips lying on the chest of a sleeping boy, a treat for him to find when he woke up. Then we stopped at an ATM so I could withdraw money. When I finished my transaction, I turned to find Jo’s eyes full of tears. It stopped me dead in my tracks as I saw liquid compassion for the street boy overflowing from her, the same boy I had hardly given a second thought. I had been planning to head straight to the coffee shop for a one-on-one with my new teammate Amanda, but in an instant I knew this was what I had prayed for – God’s agenda, not mine.

So I walked with Jo and Missy to where another street kid was sitting on the sidewalk, a boy they had met before. When we handed him the bag of fries and the leftover half of a coke, his eyes lit up. Jo sat down cross-legged on the sidewalk next to him. Missy tousled his head lovingly. His face glowed, even more than it had at receiving the food. We lingered, though the words we spoke to him were English, and his responses were Swahili. No matter. It was as if we were having a conversation anyway.

Love translates across language barriers.

As we walked away, I was completely humbled. Humbled that half an hour earlier I had complained when Jo told me that she bought me a Snickers, then gave it away to a street kid. Humbled that she had to challenge me to buy two more Snickers and give them to those kids rather than eat them myself – that it had not even been a thought in my mind. Humbled in seeing my teammates’ hearts and realizing the selfishness that is still in my own.

I thought back to Jo’s words in the ATM.

“I asked God to break my heart. And He is!”

I could picture the tears flooding her eyes and feel the heartbreak that she had felt.

“Jill,” she told me, “you’ve talked about spending the rest of your life doing international missions. We have to! How can we go back to our old lives?”

I want to be wrecked. I want my heart to break, no matter how badly it hurts. I want to be ruined for the ordinary, unable to go back to my comfy, cushy life. I want this to be not a passing emotional rush, but a heart transformation that leads to a life transformation.