Surrender

Most often my days start with problems. A myriad of needs. Things which have “gone wrong.” The water has run out. Again. People who need my help. A mama needs more money for food to feed her kids. A girl who runs away from home because she still feels strange in the safety of love's arms.

How to build a jewelry program so she doesn't have to sell herself for bread. How to fill the holes when we don't have enough people to fill them.
A mission to heal this nation which seems too large and too undoable. 

All day I want to solve problems that feel unsolvable. And this is where I surrender. Fall into Father's arms as my tired body lets the day's dirt run off me in the shower.

Father, how?

I only know this leaning. This is the only way to survive this. The only way to get up the next day and keep on loving.

I read something Michele Perry wrote today in her new book An Invitation to the Supernatural Life,  it struck me how much I understand this and how much I need to be reminded of it:

“All my good ideas were still good ideas, but they couldn’t feed a growing family or heal a dying child, let alone help a warring nation. I needed an overflow that came from heaven, not from earth.”

We can't offer our solutions. There can only be heavenly solutions to the problems of how to do what's best for my children, how to train up a nation to think entirely different than their culture. And how to pay for it all. There is no Sarita answer. More often than not, I've had to say I don't know when the day picks these bones dry.

They can wear on you. Keep you up at night. Put that pain in your neck. The worrying. 

And yet it doesn't help. Because we're thinking of it all wrong. We have to flip it and look at it from another perspective.

Father has a solution. I just don't know what it is yet. But He does, and my time with him will figure it all out. That is where he speaks to me. That is where the genius lives.

His strategy is so much better than ours.

I cannot take the problems on as though it were my guilt or my badge of honor to bear them.

And always the enemy's voice saying we're not doing enough.
They are His. His kids. His heartbeat. His vision. His love spilled out for the lost.

Perhaps that is why he sometimes lets us come to the end of ourselves. So we can see clearly, it's only He who can do it.

Surrender is our invitation to let Him in, and watch him move heaven and earth for us.

What six years has taught me

Six years.
I ask God sometimes, “how do you do it?”

How do you hold each of us in your heart? With equal importance. With so much love.
Doesn't it hurt?

Don't you buckle under our sea of faces?
An organization is just made up of people. Faces. Names. Friends. Ones who are loved.

And it is only as strong as it's relationships.

And just when you think there is not enough space in your heart for one more. One more person. One more story. One more face. One more friend. You fall in love again. 

I cannot say what I've done in 6 years. Because I don't know. I don't have the statistics. I didn't keep track. I just have people. Relationships. Faces. Hugs. Hugs I dream about before waking.

My person (s.)

And in the end, that is all we have, really. The one.

I cannot really reach the multitudes. I do not have what it takes to touch the thousands. I just have the one by one's.

The one I think about before I can sleep. The one I cry for and pray for. The one I believe God for.

It's the line from one of my favorite books, “We cannot weep for millions, we can only weep by ones.”
And I guess that's the way Jesus worked anyway.

I met Stella six years ago. 

In the most horrible place on earth. A camp where the only currency is hopelessness. Or what part of you, you can sell. After the rebels, and babies, there wasn't much left.

I don't think she had many friends.

And well to be honest, I didn't either. Just a little American girl who thought she knew how to save the world.

But I saw something in her. Even then. That she was true.

When we lived together in our makeshift home, Stella would teach me how to start a charcoal stove to make chapati, or how to end a fight—with laughter. She taught me how to put a baby to sleep, and how to wash clothes by hand.

Somewhere in the middle of punching the bread loaf down, we became friends.

When someone tells me how fabulous she is, I want to cry. Because I know her faithfulness.

And I know what she's come from. I know though it's hard, she will face the new day with joy.

I know the last 6 years will not look like much when people peer into our window.

I know we will seem small. And maybe insignificant when the world so often asks us for numbers.

But I know I will write a story about Stella.

And I will really know her. Not as a story, not as a number, but as one I have loved. 

Because it's her I am dreaming of tonight.

There is always room for more, if we open ourselves to love.