A reason to run for the hills... and a reason to stay

 

                  the beauty

and the mess                           

Life is such a mixed bag sometimes.  The beauty mixed just right in with the awful, the painful and the broken.

A few weeks ago, I had the amazing priviledge to meet my Compassion child, Fatima.  She lives just on the opposite side of Cochabamba, but I've been building our relationship through letters before I met her in person.  I went to her home, and was heartbroken by the gut-wrenching poverty she lives in...  worse than any home I've ever seen in all my time in Bolivia.  The smell of cat pee and sweat, mixed with the stench of rotting food.  Flies filled the air.  Broken plastic bowls, old clothes and other discarded items strewn all over.  Their crumbling adobe house perched precariously on the edge of the landslide-prone hillside.

playing basketball at Fatima's house

Her family life is just as painful, with a mom who has severe mental disabilities, causing her to occasionally forget who Fatima is and and beat her daughter.  Fatima herself is painfully shy, not affectionate, and often seems disconnected from the world around her, hiding from what it holds.  After going to the Compassion center, meeting her teacher and other staff members, I was encouraged by the hope that her future holds because she has access through Compassion to life changing opportunities and the the hope of Jesus.  Yet, as I said goodbye, I couldn't help feeling like there must be something more I can do in the here and now.  Something that would swoop her up, taking her out of her desperate home life and into the arms of a mother who loves her and cherishes her.  Into a home where everything is clean, where there's enough to eat, and where she is safe and warm.

reading a story with Fatima

That evening, when I walked up the stairs to enter my apartment building, flipping on the light and climbing the clean marbled stairs, it hit me like a truck.  I was flattened by the injustice, by the unfairness of my nice, safe home while Fatima was just on the other side of the city, sharing a bed with someone else in her family, worrying every time it rains, wondering if the hillside will last another storm.  It seems like these questions just keep coming.  It doesn't get any easier.  In fact, sometimes it feels like it just gets harder and harder.  No wonder the ascetics ran for the hills.  Our broken world sometimes seems to much to handle.

 my church family
(plus many more missing!)

The beauty mixed in with the broken is my church.  Just last Sunday, the church service was bursting at the seams.  Our "sanctuary" is built for about 30 people comfortably, and there were easily over 50 people at church.  Three young men stepped forward at the end of the service to receive Christ.  The hardened, tough mom of one of the girls I disciple, who swore she wouldn't come to our church,  has been coming for a month, beaming as we sing worship songs, toting her daughter's Bible to the services.  Youth group has grown from 10 to 25.  A non-Christian friend from Monday night soccer (an outreach tool to reach the young men in the neighborhood) who I've been praying for for months shared last night that Jesus had appeared to him several nights in a dream.  He went on to share that he had been moved by a story he'd read about Jesus and wanted to know where he could find more stories to learn more about Him.

I am blown away by the ways I've seen the Spirit move in the last few weeks.  His love for His people, the way that He beats the bushes to find them, the lost sheep, is so evident.  What a hope we have in Him!!