This is day 3 of being back in the States and my heart is still so heavy. My thoughts are all jumbled up, which will be shown in my writing. I am finding myself angry and intolerant, sad and upset, just filled with so many emotions. I am angry with people here who live their lives as if people aren't poor, destitute, and dying because of basic needs. "Out of sight, out of mind."
I never looked beyond the lives I saw with my eyes. I had a heart for the poor and destitute, but after going to Guatemala, I have a whole new understanding of the word "poverty." In the States, the people who are considered "poor" or living in "poverty" when looking on the social economic hierarchy still have a roof over their head, food on their tables, clothes on their backs, shoes on their feet, education for their kids, access to medicine, stores, cars, public transit, electricity, clean water, and most likely have some form of cell phone, whether a basic cell phone or even smartphone. Most adults have probably completed at least a high school degree.
Well now I've seen poverty with my own eyes, walked on the trash filled roads of peoples "homes" at a garbage dump, felt the warm hands of the children in the rescue center, and heard the cries of the children we rescued on our last day. Those will permanently be locked in my brain. After coming back into the states, I find myself being more and more irate with it. I find myself in tears. How can we be so shallow? To have everything we need and more, yet still complain because we want more? It's a vicious cycle that leaves us greedy and selfish. I am angry at all the people who say "I'm blessed to have everything I do" yet have no inclination to change their abundant, selfish lifestyles to serve the poor. For the babies who are abandoned like Diego, fighting for life like Henry, and reserved and shy like my sweet boy Elsa after being put in a foreign place without the people he's been with for the 3 years of his life. I cry because I am angry. I cry because my mind still can't grasp that there are millions more stories like this around the world, and just in Guatemala. And yet America is blind to this..
There is so much more to life.
Before Guatemala, my focus was healthy living, exercising, and counting down the days until I was done with the semester. And every single day leading up to my trip to guatemala, I was faced with spiritual warfare. I just didn't want to go... it was too out of my comfort zone. My emotions of missing my family were overwhelming. The week before my trip, my car acted up and I took it in. $1800 later, it was fixed. I was so focused on myself, my own "problems," I never even thought to serve others. I was so lost.
I read this devotional this morning.It says that when we are broken for Him, He trusts us to give him our best. Do we really know what we're asking for when we pray to "break our hearts for what breaks his"? I sure didn't. I was asking the creator of the world to break my heart to be identical to His. How overwhelming, but how absolutely needed it was. I've realized when God broke my heart for His people in Guatemala, my whole life is different. My whole world has a different perspective. I don't want that to change. I want to remain in a broken state so my passion to serve these people never dies. So I can continue going back and serving. So while I am here in the States, I can raise money for Hope Of Life and the children and people they reach. But my fear is that as I get back into my normal routine of college life, I will forget the poverty there and fade back into my old selfish living. I pray everyday to not let that happen.
As I reflect on all the broken places and faces I saw, I also know God has a plan for the hungry, the destitute, and lost. It's in me. It's in you. We are called to be servants. James 1:27: “Pure and lasting religion in the sight of God our Father means that we must care for orphans and widows in their troubles, and refuse to let the world corrupt us.” And when God breaks you, He's restoring you.
Do more. Be more. For the glory of God, to help others in need.
To help and change you.
To be broken for His will.
xo
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