Driving past an orange-pink sunset, I sat crammed in a bus with my equally sweaty and exhausted team. We were on our way home from a village day with the kids. But I was in a bus and not a tuk tuk. They spoke Spanish, not Khmer. And they didn’t run to me screaming my name. I was in Costa Rica and not Cambodia. And I wanted no part of it. I watched my team giving piggy back rides, playing tag, and sitting in circles on the grass using the extent of their Spanish to get a word through to the kids. And I sat and watched with a heart too broken to join in. I closed my eyes and thought of Soya, Chon Ri, Tirad. As the sun set I knew it was rising for them, and as the one year mark approached I wondered if they remember my name. I remembered each game we played, the broken but full conversations, and the tears and the pain that goodbye brought with it. I knew I wasn’t giving my all to those kids. But that day, my heart was across the Atlantic. So I sat in a corner with a million memories of the place I call home and the people I call family.
To my surprise, it wasn’t so easy giving my love this time around. In the same way you are guarded any other time your heart breaks, I let my hurt close me off. Again to my surprise, our ministry in Nicaragua is working with children. I was thrilled to hear this, (I really do love kids), but I’m all too familiar with leaving the people you love. Unknowingly, I think my original game plan was to never get attached. But it wasn’t God’s.
Something changed today. At lunch, I grabbed my water bottle, sat away from my team and moved next to a little boy and girl. The boy’s shirt said NY on it. So I used my pitiful Spanish vocabulary to tell him where I’m from. “New York es mi casa!!” “ En Los Estados Unidos?” “Si!!” then came a bunch of Spanish I didn’t understand. “Si!” I said again; seems to do it most of the time. In his rambling, I barely caught the word Nicaragua, and revealed the side of my water bottle with the world map on it to them. I pointed to New York, made a funny engine noise and put my arms out like an airplane. With my finger, I drew the path to Nicaragua. “Uno month…er.…mes?” They seemed to understand. And right in that moment, a memory surfaced that’s still plenty sore. I was in Cambodia looking out at the stars, when one of the boys at the orphanage, Piet, ran up to me. He sat down with me and said “Shani, 2 days you,” made an airplane noise and drew a line with his finger, “Americ.” I said yes, and his face spoke out everything we both couldn’t say.
Since leaving Cambodia, there’s been no need to fight for my heart back from that place. But I am trying now, because these kids deserve it too. And in that moment at the lunch table, it occurred to me that my heart will break again. And that’s okay. When I ask God to make my heart look like his, only then will there be enough to spread from one continent to another. God’s love is big enough to encompass us all. He is just as much the father of these children, as he is to those children, as he is to me. I am learning that different is okay too. There, we swam in a sewage river to cool off and pass the time. Here, we give the kids rides on our shoulders around a field of volcanoes. There, we made up games with the funny fruits we could find off the ground, and here we play down by the banks. Both are fine. Both are good. Both are worthy of my all. In that moment, I wanted no part of my heart breaking again. But I am quickly learning that to have a broken heart is why I came.
