Five months ago, I slung back a cup of coffee in my second floor apartment that had a perfect gray and white themed aesthetic. Nothing was out of place; accents of gold were strategically arranged throughout the room. My textbook laid across my lap, I read about Colombia and took notes for the class I was enrolled in and I remember the thought as it crossed through my mind and I shifted on my dark gray couch: I will absolutely never go to Colombia.
That moment comes back to me a thousand times a day as I walk these streets and even now as I sit at a small café table that overlooks streets of Medellín. When I first agreed to lay down all my textbook reasons for not coming to Colombia, it was because of the 43 people I would be traveling with. I had fallen in love with Gap N and the 5 other leaders of our squad; it was those people that got me here. But it was someone else entirely that changed my view of everything once we arrived.
Our first day of ministry, I found myself not all that shaken by the poverty I was confronted with. My hands have touched the pain of physical and spiritual poverty many other times in my life; I have known what it is to weep with the broken. I felt my heart frustrated that I seemed somewhat unaffected by the contrast of this world to my own. The culture shock was no longer shocking and that reality was hard and painful to swallow. I began to grow angry with myself, wondering how it seemed I was becoming cynical and unaffected. As my group began to walk back to our temporary home, we stopped by a house filled with children. They all came running out, one of them being the most beautiful little boy. Of all of us standing around, he ran straight to me and gripped me in a tight hug.
Suddenly, I thought about my gray couch, my white walls, and my strategically placed gold decor. I thought about my textbook lying across my lap. I thought about the words I vowed holding my steaming cup of coffee.
As his dusty face snuggled into my side, I thought of that girl five months ago. I wished I could grab that textbook and throw it clear across her apartment, smashing her golden statues. I wanted to cry for her, and how she was more comfortable sitting with those golden statues than amongst these children of God.
There were a lot of years when I let fear write the script. Sometimes the author was a textbook, the media, well-intentioned people, or my own idolized common sense. I let myself believe that He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands was just a song I sang as a little girl in Sunday school. And if I’m honest, I really believed that it only applied to my little corner of the universe, and didn’t cover the places the newspaper headlines and textbooks don’t print favorably.
I hummed that tune inside my four walls that held its beautiful neutral palettes, but pressed pause when Colombia became apart of the world I had to believe His hands hold.
But after those big brown eyes looked up at me and those little hands gripped my jeans, I am finding myself able to hum that tune again.
