It was our last night in Zimbabwe and I was sitting all alone in my favorite room at Youth For Christ. The walls are a pukey, peach color with baby blue peaking out from underneath. The door is also painted baby blue, but the peeling paint shows it used to be white. There’s two perfectly round windows on the inside wall which… doesn’t make sense at all. Three of the walls are filled with windows that are cracked from top to bottom, some of the shards are taped together. There’s some nails on the wall in a corner that look like a funky coat rack, and a strange turquoise block that’s maybe a trash can? Never did figure that one out.
Sometimes at night or early in the morning there’s a spider the size of my palm that crawls out of the window sill and just sits on the wall. I’ve never seen him actually move. He just magically shows up and disappears. I named him Charles. He really likes Indie music and Housefires.
In the middle of the room is a beautiful wood table where so many meaningful moments have happened for me in Zimbabwe. I’ve started every morning at that table with coffee and oatmeal and Jesus. Sometimes pouring out my heart, sometimes crying, sometimes just being frustrated about why God feels so far away right now.
During the day, the table has brought so many people together and overheard so many different conversations. Everything from aliens, future dreams, laughing at someone falling off the plastic chairs, tough conversations, late night giggles about absolutely nothing, debates over who to skip in Phase 10, and story after story about the best and worst times in our lives.
In three short weeks, I became quite attached to this funky sunroom. But now I have had to move the sunroom to my list of favorite spaces on Earth and accept that the sunroom is only a memory.
Goodbyes are my least favorite part of every month.
It’s become routine:
Meet people
Share life together
Get really close
Say goodbye
Repeat
Last month was especially hard after getting to spend time with kids who are so desperate for relationship. We spent some time at an orphanage where the girls would just sit by me during lunch and ask me every question they could come up with. We’d start playing games in the afternoon and they would sit by me and whisper more questions about favorite sports or food or anything… anything that a best friend should know about them. Anything a parent should know about them.
The last day we visited, I couldn’t handle the look in their eyes as they grabbed my hands tightly and asked me when I was coming back. I had to tell them I wasn’t coming back, and they didn’t want to believe me. They’d grab harder and say “no, what day next week?”
I hated being another person in their lives that didn’t love and care for them long enough. Another person in their life leaving them behind. Another goodbye.
I don’t understand why God created us with hearts capable of loving so deeply and so quickly, but He keeps calling me to move on. I don’t understand how at the beginning of every month I think that maybe I’ve reached the capacity of how many people I can love around the world, but every month that capacity keeps growing. I don’t how understand how this can all hurt so much but also be so beautiful, and starting in Haiti I really really wanted it all to stop.
We’ve been in Haiti for a week now, and I’ve really struggled. My heart just wanted to go back to Africa. Even though Haiti is the poorest country in the world, I didn’t feel the need of why I am here. There didn’t seem to be anything that I personally could do at first. I was in a perpetual bad mood that continued to get worse in every situation.
One of the best parts about the Lord is that he continually meets us where we are at. At our first kids club in Haiti, I was standing off to the side trying to keep my grumpiness away from the kids. Then a little preschool boy came over, grabbed my hand, and stood next to me or wanted me to hold him for the rest of the program.
The next day we had finished carrying cement mix up a hill to a house, and I was, again, standing off to the side of the road sweating buckets as we waited for the truck to pick us up. I turned to look down this empty road when I saw this little girl appear. As soon as I smiled at her, she started sprinting towards me until she crashed into me with a hug. We stayed like that for the next several minutes until I had to leave.
Over and over, the Lord keeps sending children that need love and that I equally need love from. I know that goodbyes this month are going to be just as hard as every other month, but that’s okay. I’m starting to understand that the love the Lord gives us is kinda like peanut butter on a piece of bread.
If you leave the dollop of peanut butter in one place on the bread, that one bite might be really extra good, but the rest of the snack is going to be terribly boring. You have to spread the peanut butter out over the whole piece of bread, all the way to the edge of the crust. Then, you’ll have a whole slice of yumminess, not just a bite.
It’s the same way with love. Focusing all the love on one specific place might really make that place rich, but spreading it out might make even more places beautiful as well. And maybe those little drops of love will start to spread more love, and keep spreading to other people, who will spread it to others, and so on. I know it’s only a hope right now, but I’d rather hold on to hope than to that terrible mood of last week. Hope is so much easier to hold!
