trujillo, peru.
a place riddled with sand roads and windowed adobe homes.
a place of communal soccer games and frantic phrases exclaimed.
a place with trash filled streets and families who work hard to simply eat.
a place that may not have the fancy modern tech that north americans use to keep everything in check;
but nonetheless cared for by a God who fully knows every speck.
every speck of hurt.
every speck of brokenness.
every speck of joy.
heck, He even knows every single speck of grain on these unpaved lanes because nothing ever slips past His view,
not a single torn up shoe, wet tissue, or unrelenting flu.
fully good Lord,
and perfectly loving Father.
reality? yes.
the woman i prayed for today with tumors in her breast? reality? yes.
how about the young boy with a persistent parasite? still reality? one hundred percent.
and the other man with water filled lungs? reality.
what about the unavoidable fact that most of these people will walk down the dusty, pee smelling roads, back to their small home, and live life until one day they don’t because they never received the proper care they so desperately needed? reality? undeniably so.
adolescent girls joining the sex trade purely out of the need for survival? how about the even sadder fact that these girls, reduced to nothing but a piece of meat, consider abuse true love? ya. that’s also an undeniable reality.
He’s a detailed oriented God,
fully good Lord,
and perfectly loving Father.
still reality?
if so, why doesn’t He do anything?
if He actually is undeniably good, sovereign, and loving, then shouldn’t He just “fix” all these undeniably tragic realities?
that’s a question my team and i talked about for a while last night.
we wrestled with our doubts and asked the hard questions.
we compared what we know to be true of God to what we know to be true of the immense poverty here in trujillo.
we came to this conclusion:
1.God is equally loving and just.
2.God is always sovereign.
3.He already did do something, He sent His son to die on the cross for us so that we may have an abundant life.
God calls us precious and He views us as treasure- greater and of more worth than anything you or i could ever dream of.
it was never His desire for us to live in world full of brokenness and sickness; but because of our sinful nature, this is the world we’ve chosen and continually chose. we endlessly strive after the fleeting satisfaction and empty promises of lust, gluttony, greed, laziness, wrath, envy, and pride. we endlessly seek to fulfill our own desires and our reluctance to turn to God has consequently dug us all deeper into physical, emotional, and spiritual poverty. the same poverty my team and i witness here in peru on a daily basis.
the venezuelan refugee selling herself for money? reality? yes.
the pregnant wife abandoned by her husband? reality? yes.
the starving child? reality? yes.
what about this…
He’s a detailed oriented God,
fully good Lord,
and perfectly loving Father.
reality?
yes.
He’s a detailed oriented God,
fully good Lord,
and perfectly loving Father.
…an undeniable truth that speaks life into an undeniably impoverished world.
