Finding My Life in His

This post is kind of a summary of the last months, I suppose. There are the pictures – the moments of joy and beauty and colour that we tend to isolate and hang on our walls. But there’s also the string of words, the unbroken prayer, the daring to live in the hard, hidden times that weaves it all together. 

I found this beautiful Puritan prayer… and I marvel at the mystery of how He really does fill all of our lives: the boring, the repetitious, the terrifying, the sorrowful, the difficult, the stressful are all just opportunities to be filled to all fullness in Him. I marvel at how He doesn’t stop at being the Father of good gifts (and we get such good gifts here – just look at the beautiful faces below!), but He creatively involves Himself even in the messes we make to form this glorious radiance of holiness in everything….

acting out Palm Sunday

Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly, Thou hast brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the depths but see Thee in the heights; hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold Thy glory.

Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up, that to be low is to be high,

Let me learn….that the broken heart is the healed heart, that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,

Passover: we “killed” our lamb puppet and applied the blood

let me learn….that the repenting soul is the victorious soul, that to have nothing is to possess all,

that to bear the cross is to wear the crown, that to give is to receive, that the valley is the place of vision.

Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from deepest wells, and the deeper the wells the brighter Thy stars shine;

let me find Thy light in my darkness, Thy life in my death, Thy joy in my sorrow, Thy grace in my sin, Thy riches in my poverty, Thy glory in my valley.

Amen.

Give us Grace, Not “Normal”

Her eyes lock mine. Her wrinkled face is contorted, and her statement comes out as a question; “God will help us…?” I glance down at her daughter suffering on the hospital bed, recovering from an operation, and then back at the face so close to mine. The eyes begging an answer. I say the one word, the yes. Anna she sings, and I play my flute. We try to bring the melody of grace to this one girl in a bustling hospital full of hurting people. It is His faithfulness and mercy to the girl who wears fresh wounds deep in her stomach. She will scar and there will be no more smoothness, just a memory of the suffering. The floor is cracked, the walls are dirty, people are shuffling past and a baby is wailing but we pray that now, like never before, she will know His presence. Because sometimes pain drives us into His presence, into His peace.

—-

Half an hour later, we are sitting at another young lady’s home, enjoying the cool shade under the thatched roof of their sitting-place. Little girls play with piles of pebbles, and a chicken wanders through puddles of sunshine dancing on the dirt floor.

As the talk continues, we get into deeper subjects. I hear the story of the little girl sitting on my friends lap. How she was brought when a tiny baby, dropped off by her mother who left and hasn’t come back. How she had an operation and my friend stayed with her at the hospital for all those days. How she drank juice and sugary tea and water, and now was just beginning to eat. How she saw my friend as her mother. The story keeps coming, but it’s so similar to the ones I’ve already heard so many times from girls my age. So many have little girls or little boys who they “mother” in whatever way they think best. The little ones are almost entirely spoiled with instant gratification of their every wish. I think of the article I read this week about how the lack of a father affects children and I swish my water in the tin cup and pray in my heart for the children of Congo.

I ask if it doesn’t break the mother’s heart to come back and find her baby attached to someone else? Doesn’t it hurt a mother to be constantly working and return in the evening to find her children distanced from her, to find that she cannot talk to her daughters anymore?

Oh, but it’s normal, they tell me. Parents mostly want to get their children to university and get them married/settled down somewhere, they tell me. Parents know that university will ruin their children, and many don’t check out the integrity of their child’s spouse as long as there is enough money in the marriage to make them feel important.

They say it like this hard fact. So many parents figure their kids are ruined anyways by that age that they don’t even try to salvage them. Maybe the parents themselves don’t have anything else to offer their kids, I think. 

After all, it is normal.

“How can you ask if someone regrets that they only eat with their mouth, and not with their eyes or nose?” they ask me, “They don’t even know that another way exists.”

I close my eyes to stop the pounding in my head. I see the face of that girl in the hospital. So that’s where she’ll end up? I open my eyes and see the happy little girl still playing with her pebbles and it makes me sick to think of her future. I see the toddler cuddled in my friend’s lap and think of where her mother is….where her father is….I think of how girls from nine and up are put in charge of rearing babies and toddlers – they do not know how to raise them. Oh, the children of Congo!

In the evening friends come to see me, and they speak of all the same issues. One says that when she’s a mother, if she doesn’t want all her children, she’ll just ‘give some away’. Speaks of how she’s trained her younger siblings to love and obey her instead of their mother.

Pray for this new generation, that there would be a new mentality, that they would have new hearts….

Grace has begun, we see healing in families. There are always exceptions to normal. But there is still so far to go….

Pray for the parents of Congo.

When God’s Heart Breaks

“Helping Traumatized Children” was written in bold, dark letters over the top of the page I was scanning. Those words, “traumatized children”, are nothing new for me. I’ve always known vaguely that such problems exist. But now there I was, seated in a corner of a neatly painted room, listening in on a Trauma Healing workshop, and unaware that I was going to be given a glimpse of the horror trauma brings to a child’s life.

As I listened from my little corner to story after story being told, I was appalled at what children suffer:

One man began talking of how a mother called him to see her boy, who she insisted was possessed with an evil spirit. The man took time alone with the young boy, asking him questions. He discovered that the boy was traumatized with a series of events. “He woke one night to see a shadowy figure standing over him and his siblings, feeling them, and when he cried out, it ran away….He saw his house go up in flames, with everything inside…he saw the head of a soldier who hadn’t been paid and was despairing of life in a pool of blood where the soldier had killed himself….he saw two LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) soldiers -” here the man was interrupted and the conversation went on, but I in my corner was sitting shocked by what I had just heard. How could such a young child endure all those memories? The man continued speaking; “as I talked to him, I had him draw pictures of everything he had seen. They were very detailed. After we had talked about it, the boy went back to living normally again. It wasn’t an evil spirit.”

African parents often don’t take the time to listen to their children talk about their problems. One man left his family at home. While he was gone, a fierce thunderstorm came and a bolt of lightening struck the house, killing the mother and severely burning the children. The children spent two months in the hospital convalescing, and after this incident they became fiercer. The father beat them when they behaved badly, but that only intensified the problem. After a few months, the father attended a trauma workshop at the church where he realized that his children were traumatized. It had never occurred to him that he should talk with his children over what had happened, as the people at the workshop were telling him to do.

Suddenly that long word “traumatized” had jumped off the page and taken the visible, real form of a hurting, confused child. It was no longer a problem the big, wide world had to deal with, it became the tortured face of a little girl who had seen her parents murdered.

My cowardly heart shrank back from these horrible stories. But the words continued to fill the room and I listened to them because I had no other choice. Because deep down I knew that the God who created each of these children and knew their names before the beginning of the world hears each of their cries, and for that reason so must I.

I couldn’t help putting myself into the stories, trying to understand what these children went through….If I was a young child, what would go through my heart when I see my little friend shot down dead at my feet? When I’m thereafter traumatized, act sullen, and am told that I have an evil spirit and kicked out onto the streets? When people refuse me? When I have those terrible memories swirling constantly in my heart, but never allowed to be expressed? When I’m kidnapped for the army as a young child, and then when I’ve been returned even my parents are afraid of me? I heard of an eight or nine year old boy who was stationed at the airport, holding a machine gun. Can you imagine how God’s heart must break?

Child soldiers, orphans, children who are traumatized– and their family concludes that they have an evil spirit….the heart of God breaks.

My eyes were opened today to a problem I wasn’t aware of before. Pray that the church in Isiro will also be able to see the hurting children in their midst and to love them…for Jesus’ sake.