“Ultimately our gift to the world is HOPE. Not blind hope that pretends everything is fine and refuses to acknowledge how things are. But the kind of hope that comes from staring pain and suffering right in the eyes and refusing to believe that this is all there is. It is what we all need- hope that comes not from going around suffering but from going through it. We can insist that hope is real…”
(Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis)
Gretchen’s eyes get huge as we are swimming in the ocean and yells, “GET OUT!!” Sarah, Gretchen, and I ride the wave in, and we see the group of Thai guys, who were swimming next to us, eyes huge. It was no shark- it was their friend. Out there, stuck, drowning. Gretchen starts swimming as the first life guards jump in. They tell her to get back. We stand with the Thai friends and the girls from SHE who joined us for the day for what seemed like forever. I was praying and felt like my hands and legs were useless. What the heck am I doing standing knee deep in water when someone is dying?!?! There was nothing we could do. Talk about the worst feeling in the world. This has happened to me once before, when I was in Chincha, Peru (pre World Race days) and a man in front of me had a heart attack (he later found out at the same time he had pneumonia, a chemical attack, mini stroke, and had to have a quadruple bypass on his heart). They got him out about a half hour later. As they placed him on the beach, water and foam came out of his mouth, and he still had some color in him. Check the pulse! Do CPR! Move over and I will!! But, they picked him up before anything else could be done and put him in the back of this small SUV with no one else but the driver. His friends sat in the back of his pickup truck, looking as numb as I felt. The Thai was only about 25 years old. The lifeguards shrug their shoulders at the fact that the man died. What is the value of life?
So, I am left on the shores trying to figure out what it really means to hope. I know God was teaching me this lesson before I got here, and somehow it all ties into this disaster but I can’t seem to parallel it at the moment….
Oh, and I head off to Vietnam in a day. We are going to be staying in a hostel, where the bottom floor is rented out for prostitution. Please pray for me and the squad as that kind of stuff is so intense and draining spiritually. Love you all, and thank you for praying and supporting me!
