"Give me your eyes for just one second, give me your eyes so I can see, everything that I've been missing, give me your love for humanity" (Brandon Heath 'give me your eyes')
Here I am. I now have 3 remaining days here at Kids International Ministries (KIM) in the Philippines. It seems like yesterday when we arrived and the Lord was breaking my heart and convicting me. God showed me a child, a young boy that was in rags tugging on my leg with no food and no family begging me to help with wide eyes and a look of desperation. I had what he needed, I had food and shelter and love to give him, but I was walking away and I was just giving him the left over food I found in my pocket. The Lord used this visual to bring me to my knees, to ask Him to forgive me for the way I have been living with far too much. He brought me to my knees in surrender: Lord, I don’t know what to do I don’t know what to say, but I offer you my life with my arms high and heart abandoned, in desperation to hear from you.
I know I am turning a corner with the Lord and down here on this Earth. The reality is beginning to sink in of all the rawness that I have seen and the realness of heaven and the kingdom that is available and awaits all who call out.
It sinks in when I do devotion at night with the toddlers in the children’s home. When they all look up at me singing to them from their beds all in a row, it sinks in that they really don’t have any mommy’s and daddy’s to tuck them in at night. It hits me when one of the girls asks me if my mom used to brush my hair when I was little, and I realize she hasn’t had a mommy to brush her hair and tell her she is beautiful. I see it when I am out with Pastor Jo Jo and we are doing house church in a bamboo shack that is covered in water because of the rain, and we are sharing testimonies and one of the men stands up, he has eight kids and his wife is not there because she is at the garbage dump looking for food, he shares a story of how the Lord provided last week, they didn’t have food to eat and a man came by looking for laborers for the day so he got enough money for him and his family to eat that day.
This is real, Kate, these are people’s lives, and it is not ok. This is not ok. Sometimes I just want to scream it out, everyone wakeup, wakeup, we have to help these people!!! The Lord has been screaming it to me this month, and sometimes I don’t know where to start but He is saying LOSE YOUR LIFE, GIVE GENEROUSLY, LOVE UNTIL IT HURTS. One of the girls in the home asked me today “Ate’ Kate, lets hug each other so hard that we can’t breathe”, I want that, I want to love people until it hurts, I want to give until it hurts, I want to lose the things I think I need and give to the people who know what needing something means; and God wants to love me to death in the process, literally He wants to love me to death, so that the me, me, me dies and only His Love remains!
The children have given me many gifts while being here, mostly handcrafted art! Here is a picture of the star that one of the girls gave me with Psalm 27:10 on it “When my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me”. I look at this verse that she has written while looking at it written in the bible. This beautiful child of God knows what this verse really means, she knows who she belongs to and she fights to believe it everyday through faith. I want to take God’s Word like this sweet sister does, I want to really believe and act on what the bible says and not skip over parts. So when God says over and over again in the bible to feed the hungry, take care of the widows and orphans, sell everything you have and give it to the poor and follow HIM, love justice and mercy, correct oppression, love your neighbor as yourself; I want to DO these things not just once or twice but I want it to be my life, I want to start living out the Word of God with full faith, conviction, and assurance, I want to do all of this with JOY because for my sake, though Jesus was rich he became poor, though I was naked Jesus clothed me with HIS righteousness, though I was blind Jesus gave me His eyes to see, I CAN SEE and I want others to SEEEEEEE, Jesus He is so beautiful and heaven is so real and He means what He says, LOSE YOUR LIFE and YOU WILL FIND IT!! Church arise, it’s time to wake up the sleeping beast, the CHURCH, we need to help our brothers and sisters, choose to see and hear the cries of this world, and choose to answer the tugging on your leg, the tugging on your heart to “LOVE ME” (like the note above), whoever the ‘me’ is in your life.
