I've been reading these two new blogs. I found them on a prayer request post on a forum I visit. I'm hooked. They are medical professionals living in Uganda and serving as missionaries. It's so amazing to read through the archives, one just started, the other started in 2006, and read about their struggles, their answered prayers, their hope and triumph. Being the morbid person I can be I also find it so encouraging to read about their defeats, their recent involvement (and isolation) in an Ebola outbreak that has recently raveged the area they serve in.
It begins to put into perspective the life that I lead. I read a letter yesterday that made me physically ill. This issue that I'm so desperately wanting to be closed and over with is not, and I'm still not sure when it will be. I've left the final decision up to someone else that is involved, for various reasons, not the least of which is that I love her and know she wants to do something in response to this letter we received and the accusations that accompanied it. But the thought of trudging through this process again, isn't that bad. I mean, it's crap, but everyone has crap right?
But reading these testimonies of endless days, being the only 911 available to people, the satisfaction of falling into bed knowing that you have wrung every last possible drop of productivity and helpfullness out of the day, it just stirs a desire that is so deep inside of me that I can scarce describe what it is.
There is so much need in the world, so much hurt, so much disease, poverty, hopelessness. All I want to do is leave everything and help. Everything in me cries out to do whatever it is I can to help. Some days it seems like I don't do enough, other days it seems like I'm helping as best I can.
I've talked before to some of you....or maybe on here I can't remember....about how need can be so big and overwhelming, how we can't look at it all at one time because then we would be so overwhelmed that we would do nothing. The quote from Mother Teresa that reverberates through my head is one of a question she was asked. The person asked her, how did you manage to carry so many thousands of people off the street. She replied, well I picked up one, carried him inside and set him down. Then I picked up another.
Today is one of the days, that I feel so torn between wanting to run to Uganda and do anything my non-medical self can do to help, when I want to sell everything I own just for the chance to help a little more. Today is one of the days that I'm looking at the big picture and this groaning in my heart, this cry that keeps coming back to do more, be more, help more is getting louder and I feel such an urgent need to verbalize what it is that will come from this heart cry.
Is this truly where my fear of commitment comes from? This idea that if I were committed to a person, a family, a home that I would be unable to run to places all the time where there is need. Is this just me fleeing from the letter yesterday and all the memories it brings back to the forefront of my mind?
I just don't know.
All I know is I am so encouraged that these groanings aren't some crazy mental break when I read the stories on these blogs. Our church has been talking about going to Ghana in '08 to visit missionaries that we support. When I was talking about it with my friends later that week one of them said he'd never go to a country where there were cholera outbreaks. But you know, if there was a way for me to have walked out of their house and onto a plane headed for Africa that day I would have.
It's all so exciting and terrifying at the same time. I feel like I'm hurrying through a process that God has set out for me and I do not want to do that. Because I know, there are things I need to "fix" (for lack of a better phrase) before I can move through this stage.....now all I need is the courage to fix those things.
I got the OT on audio bible for Christmas. I started Genesis this morning and am so excited. I was at the part (since it's audio I don't know the verse, and I don't have an OT handy to look it up) when Hagar had fled Abraham and Sarah's house after she had conceived Ishmael. An angel appeared to her by the well and told her to return to their house, and that God had not forsaken her. She replied by saying that she would because He was the God who sees her.
I have spent so much time feeling unseen, invisible and worthless. But God always saw me. He always saw me no matter what I was doing, where I was, or how anyone treated me. He sees me now. He sees this groaning in my heart and he's answering me.
No matter how far you feel from God, from family, friends, or even any peace, God sees you. He has not forsaken you and he pants after you and desires you more then we can possibly imagine.
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