Break my heart for what breaks Your’s.
Check.
Everything in me collapsed. My teammates had to hold me up on either side as I wept. And in the pain, my heart cried again…how can this be good? Was this a dream?
Hearts weren’t created to break like this. Or to stay broken.
When something gets taken away, or when things don’t go the way you thought they would, when you don’t understand why—that’s when you really come face-to-face with whether or not you trust that God is good in your life, that what He’s doing is good.
Enter Aguapanela.
Every Wednesday night in Medellín Colombia, my team serves at Aguapanela. We take a large barrel of aguapenela (sugar water) and loaves of bread, cram ourselves into a truck, and travel to a neighborhood in downtown Medellín with one of the largest number of displaced people in all of South America. Picture over a thousand people packed onto two city blocks—the majority smoking crack, drunk, high, or performing sexual favors right in front of you. All homeless.
What I witnessed this last Wednesday, nothing could have prepared me for.
There was a man in line to receive his portion of aguapanela and bread. He had the sweetest eyes. I was standing about five feet from him. As he was standing in line, three other men approached him. They pushed him out of line, threw him to the ground and started kicking him repeatedly. I froze. One of the men pulled a knife from his belt and gashed the man’s head. The three men then stole his shoes and left him there helpless. By the time he brought himself to stand back up, all of the aguapanela and bread was gone. He received nothing.
I didn’t see it coming. It felt all out of order, all wrong. It was like getting punched in the gut, the air sucked from my lungs. Pain turned to hot lead in my chest. Why? Why him? Why now? Why didn’t I do anything? And most of all—How can this be good?
But in the midst of the crushing storm, I saw His eyes. I saw the familiar love there.
The storm looks different for all of us, but it always comes. Rarely are we ready. Lives unravel. We all hurt—and hurt deeply at times. We all have questions. He can handle it—our hurt, our screaming, our broken pieces. But the ultimate bent of our broken hearts—peace or bitterness—comes down to this: How big is God to us? How well do we know Him? And do we know Him well enough to trust that He’s writing a better story than what we could’ve written ourselves?
I’ll never forget the way it felt to watch those three men almost beat another man to death. I’ll never forget the look in the helpless man’s eyes. Witnessing that wasn’t the story I was expecting God to write. I could have come up with a bunch of endings I thought were much, much better. That man left an imprint on my soul. I believe he was striving and hungry for Him, he just didn’t know Him yet.
Everyone on my team noticed the man. It was hard not to. He stood out. Blood dripping from his ears and the fresh wound on his head. There was a light in his eyes. So what in the world was the benefit of this man’s beating? How was this better?
It’s messy, really messy, this place where our fragile human emotions and even frailer ability to comprehend the big picture meet the story of a God who touches our broken world with a love that doesn’t make ay sense. It’s messy. The place where we look at our deep hurt and feebly remind our hearts that “we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).
We tend to go to God like He’s an equation. We think if what He’s said is true, we should be able to make it all work out prettily if we put our pencils to paper and do the math right. It’s tempting to want to point to that verse about how all things work together for our good, put this man’s beating on one side of the equation and write “equals good”…and then get hurt. Good? Seriously? How? Show me. Prove it.
But like pretty much everything else in God’s economy, it’s not an equation we can wrap our minds around. It’s a story with billions of moving parts—the incalculable products of a broken, sinful world, slamming up against the infinite mercy of God. And it’s drawing one big, messy, beautiful picture. We know God wins, and because He wins, so do we. But right now, the carnage is ferocious. It hurts. In our limited view it looks like nothing adds up. It’s hard to see that all is going to end well.
Tim Keller once said, “While other world views lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming of sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy.” That’s exactly where God has me every time I step out of the truck at Aguapanela: Sit in the midst of these people’s sorrow and taste the coming joy.
We don’t have to agonize over the small stuff—or the big stuff, for that matter. We pray. We live. We can trust Him to know the big picture, even when it doesn’t make sense, even when we don’t realize the “small” decisions we make are actually big ones.
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Matthew 11:28
So we come, and He makes good on His promises. Today He catches my tears. One day soon, He’ll wipe them away. Every single one.
As much as I long for that day when everything is set right, it’s not here yet. It’s still on the far side of death, and the only way to get there is by following the beckoning of a Savior who faced death for us and loves us more than we can understand. Following Him one more day. And then another. We make the choice the moment we wake up each morning. We trust He’ll get us through the day before our feet ever hit the floor.
The more we do that, the more faithful we realize He is, the more we realize how much He wants us to know Him. To let Him carry us. To come out on the other side with a heart more in tune with His. And more and more, we realize we want that at any cost.
He knows exactly what He’s doing. He’s bringing beauty from the ashes. This side of heaven, I’ll never know the whole picture. But even so, as I stare at the mess, I thank Him for the fact that I know He’s purposeful in my life. For the things I see, and even greater, the things I can’t.
I may not know all the reasons why I’m on World Race. But I do know this: God is using it to grow me. He is using it to move me. He knew He wanted to take me out of Oregon at exactly this time. And when I told Him everything was His, that’s exactly what He did. It was the next thread in the story He was weaving, and in including it, He answered my prayers. More of You, God. Whatever that means.
When I felt God say GO, I applied to World Race, and my path collided with this man’s. I was at Aguapanela in just the right window of time to have his life impact my faith on a deep level. God did that.
In the moments when I lay facedown on the floor, forehead pressed to the carpet, tears pouring out from a bottomless well, my heart whispered the question, Why did I have to witness that?
But even as I thought it, would I change it? No way. I know God better because I saw this man. And I know God better from having the sweet privilege of grieving alongside my teammates. Because of that man’s life, I have been spurred to greater passion for Him. I got to know the value of God’s exquisite grace poured out in the moments when I couldn’t even breathe.
His comfort is sweeter. And that’s just what I can see. One day, I will know the answers. That through it all, He’s bringing glory to Himself, and He’s making me holy and ready for heaven. Where I will dwell with Him forever. And friends, that is the ultimate prize.
Calm or storm, if I see Jesus’ divine presence anywhere near me, I just know I want more of it.
Every day He’s done far more than I could have imagined. There have been amazing blessings. There have been some really, really hard things. But in each and every moment, He’s brought more of Himself, and He’s brought it in ways that I never could’ve imagined or even thought to ask for.
He can do that for you too. In fact, He will, if that’s your all-out desire. He promises…you’ll seek Me and find Me, if you seek Me with all your heart. And finding Him—more and more of Him all the time—drives us to ask for even more. It drives our story.
So I request …more of You, God. Whatever that means, Whatever needs to happen.
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Family and Friends:
If you’re at all moved by this story and want to be a part of what God has called me to and where He has me at now, I’d be honored.
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Thank you for your continued prayers and support!
