Sunday, June 11, 2006

When drops become streams...

I love when you look back at an amount of time and realize how something has slowly invaded. I have been juggling the summer job thing, my life path, other personal aspects and have been praying and wating in various ways. Well in the last few days thoughts of foreign places and images of children have crept back in.
I got a call last week about returning to work with the Elementary school, which is full of refugee families. I brushed it off a bit and thought maybe later. Now from all that has been triggered in the last couple of days I am seriously reevaluating if that is the direction which may be best for a part-time job. I am going to at least take a step this week and find out what position they might have for me and when.
I watched Invisible Children Friday night. It reminded me of so many things, of my time in Africa and my hearts reaction to the documentary 'Born Into Brothels.' Even though teaching has slipped a bit from my radar it seems there is still a passion and draw in me toward children. When I watched 'Mad Hot Ballroom' I was even significantly moved and that is not as much about meeting the same needs.
It reopened a lot of categories and questions. I was a bit frantic as I have this feeling that it is going to fade away so quickly. That the ways my heart was stirred my overwhelming compulsion to do something, to pray long and hard... that I will too quickly forget before it has been captured or channeled in some way. I honestly cannot very easily adjust back to life as we know it without these reoccuring thoughts in my mind of what is happening other places, how God will redeem what looks to be irreversable, what answered prayers or God being behind something looks like outside the US. I keep wondering what things has God done that we don't credit to him. I kept thinking about blowing up the pictures I have from Africa and China of the faces so I don't forget. I think the kid saying don't forget about us was like a haunting flashback of the conversations I had with so many kids and people in the places I have been.
Then in church today a great guy we know shared about the gods that people are worshipping in foreign places. It makes me sad that they are living out of fear and that they are so persistant but about such terrible things. I kept wondering how do we even communicate that they don't have to live out of fear. Like a lady not talking about being pregnant for fear of hexing her unborn child. I can see people from here being ridiculous and saying hey let's talk about your baby on the way, don't worry nothing will happen.
I guess in so many of these it has brought me back to God in my own feeling of helplessness. I believe he brings our different passions together to address the big picture but some of it seems so much bigger than us that it is tempting to not even start or move, to just sit in sadness. That is where the dependance on him and belief that I can only do my part, believing that other parts will come together... That redemption is coming and is happening even if I cannot make out the clearest pictures of it. Now my part: what is it now, what is even the next step... where will I be down the road, will my part look different... I know many of those I can't know so I go back to my thankfulness for the realization that a few drops have again become a stream in my life.

No comments: