The call to live in a hut!

I'm watching a show on Netflix about a family who visited El Salvador, the poorest parts, helping families in true poverty.

I am reminded of 3 major things.

1.) Even though we [my family and I] struggle, we are still extremely blessed.  Our struggles are no where near their struggles.  One El Salvadorian family on there had 14 children, but 4 have died.  One was 3 weeks old from malnutrition.  

2.) I am reminded of my own mission trip with my home church in Ohio to Honduras roughly 13 years ago.  We saw, encountered and felt so many of the same things as this family did while visiting.  It seems like only yesterday that I was there.

AND...

3.)  No matter how hard I have denied it these past 13 years, no matter how much I push it to the back of my mind, no matter how much I don't want to acknowledge the deep connection I felt in Honduras and how I did not want to board the plane to come back to "reality", no matter how hard I try, I can not escape the fact that I have felt and always feel called to live in that hut, to help these very people who have nothing.  And so many days I don't even know where to start now.

I realize how extremely blessed I am every.single.day when I sit down to a feast at my table.  Yet these people and many like them who have lost loved ones because of lack of food for weeks, still go without.  Sometimes I want to scream "stop the world!  Seriously, how CAN life go on for us when people, when 3 week babies, are dying because they have NOTHING and we have an overflow of food?

What can I do to help?  Where do I start?  I know Eric doesn't have the same calling in this sense, but I can not escape this growing yearning and uneasiness in me that I need to be doing something.

Something!  My heart is actually heavy tonight thinking these things, looking back at memories and old photos.  Something!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

6.5 years later....I still wonder about you tiny one!

Image
I will never forgot the day when I found out I was pregnant for the very first time.  It was such a rush of emotion.  Fear, happiness, contemplation, all wrapped up into one.  It wasn't the most opportune time, but let's face it when is it really?  At the heart of it all, I was ecstatic.  I was going to be a mother, and Eric a father. Several weeks later I could tell, things were not going well.  One night we found ourselves in the emergency room.  An ultrasound had been ordered.  Eric was made to leave and I was left alone in a sterile room with just the technician and myself.  She barely spoke 2 words to me.  I saw the baby and the screen was then quickly whisked around so I could see no more.  My heart sunk.  The doctor came in and said we see the baby, but no heart beat.  But don't worry.  It's still early! But I already knew in my heart.  I was nearly 8 weeks and the heart should have already been beati...
Read more

She was using food stamps! Why doesn't she work? Those are MY tax dollars!

Image
I will never forget that day. I was judging!!! I watched the lady as she absently scanned 2 Lunchables, a carton of Capri-Sun, some individual applesauce pouches, a single serving of some soda product, and a pack of mixed nuts. (do you KNOW how expensive and processed those Lunchables are anyway?? Not to mention juice pouches full of sugar.) Come on, wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to make a couple of sandwiches, and have some reusable cups and portion containers to get virtually the same meal?   Her children were a little disheveled and good god I don't think she ever brushes their hair. They were also not under control but arguing back and forth. To be honest it was rather annoying and I thought why doesn't she intervene? But wonder of wonders, they were on electronics.  And of course, she was paying with food stamps.  No mistaking that debit card anywhere. They have welfare, but still have money for that apparently.   She had some kind of Vera Bradle...
Read more

Our own one room school-house

Image
This summer we have our own one room schoolhouse, but this thought....this action has a much deeper meaning. There's something about history that draws me.  Pictures of ancient days...decades, generations, centuries gone by... black and white, faded...torn...all draw me in.  I wonder about the buildings.  About the people who came and went from those buildings.   As I was looking at old one room schoolhouse photos online I came across one that was both beautiful and eerily haunting all at once.  An abandoned, almost dilapated schoolhouse.  Not much around it, just emptiness where once there had been life. And I began to wonder again.  About the teacher or teachers that the schoolhouse had seen.  About the students who had come and gone.  About their lives, what they did, about the marriages they may have had, their own children.  If any of those descendents were living today.  And how those lives touched other lives...th...
Read more